Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was expected to meet on Wednesday with members of its consumer advisory board, which provides feedback on the bureau’s rules and policies.
Instead, one of his deputies dismissed the board’s members.
By law, the bureau must convene the advisory board and hold at least two in-person meetings with its members a year. The bureau canceled a meeting scheduled for February, and last week it canceled one planned for this week.
In place of that meeting, the bureau gathered the board’s members for a conference call on Wednesday and effectively fired them. The call was led by Anthony Welcher, who, as one of Mr. Mulvaney’s deputies, oversees external affairs for the bureau.
Mr. Welcher told those on the call that the board, which now has 25 volunteer members, would be reconstituted as a smaller group.
The consumer advisory board’s members are consumer activists, academics, entrepreneurs who run financial start-ups and industry representatives from companies including Citi, Discover, and Mastercard. Also participating on the call Wednesday were members of two other groups that advise the bureau, one representing credit unions and the other representing community banks.
“We suspected this might be coming,” said Josh Zinner, a member of the consumer advisory board and the chief executive of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. “This is a further signaling that the new leadership is almost obsessively dismantling the bureau’s accomplishments and taking it in a decidedly different, industry-friendly direction.”
