Several federal judges hearing a constitutional challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s structure yesterday called into question whether the agency’s critics are right in their argument that it has inflated powers that unfairly limit presidential authority, MorningConsult.com reported yesterday. The en banc hearing of the case, PHH v. CFPB, provided the rare opportunity of seeing two federal government agencies face off in federal court. A panel of 11 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard the case to decide whether they should uphold a separate panel’s 2016 decision authored by one of their colleagues, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, which faulted the agency’s single-director structure. Judge Kavanaugh, a member of the en banc panel, openly promoted that decision at yesterday’s hearing, and provided rhetorical backup for critics who charge that the CFPB’s structure make it uniquely unaccountable. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the president can only fire the CFPB’s director for cause before the position’s five-year term ends.
