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Mulvaney Says CFPB Under His Direction Is `Not Being Aggressive'

Mulvaney Says CFPB Under His Direction Is `Not Being Aggressive'

(Bloomberg) -- Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the agency under his leadership is enforcing the law but “not being aggressive” about its mission.

“We’re not pushing the envelope,” Mulvaney said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We’re taking a different attitude toward the job, but the priorities have not changed.”

Mulvaney, who also serves as White House budget director, said he has favored a different approach because the agency, created after the 2008 financial crisis to police mortgages, credit cards and other consumer products, is “perhaps the most unaccountable bureau or agency there is.”

“We want to run that place with a good deal of humility and prudence,” he said. “This bureau is unlike any other federal bureaucracy. It’s run by one person. Right now me.”

President Donald Trump tapped Mulvaney to run the CFPB after its first director, Richard Cordray, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, resigned in November. Cordray is now running for governor in his home state of Ohio.

The bureau will continue to protect consumers from fraud and “things that are illegal,” said Mulvaney, contrasting the approach with what he described as the willingness of the office under Cordray to make “stuff up as we go.”

“We enforce the law, we do not make the law,” Mulvaney said.

Mulvaney said he couldn’t comment on a Feb. 5 Reuters report that he had pulled back from a full-scale investigation of a data breach at credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Brody in Washington at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Mark Niquette, Ros Krasny

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