The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will team up with the Federal Trade Commission to police debt collectors as it shifts to a gentler form of enforcement under the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal reported. CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney announced the change Tuesday. Mulvaney, the White House budget director and a longtime critic of the CFPB, is revamping enforcement policy at the bureau. The CFPB’s aggressive stance under its previous Obama-appointed leadership had often caused friction with financial companies. Some Republican critics of the CFPB have called for shrinking the bureau sharply and merging its enforcement authority into the FTC’s, pointing to overlap in the two agencies’ mandates. Consumer groups and Democrats have advocated for strong independence for the CFPB, saying the FTC has few tools to regulate nonbanks, such as mortgage lenders, payday lenders and debt collectors. Mulvaney has said that he sees debt collection as an enforcement priority because the CFPB gets many consumer complaints about that industry, even as the bureau begins to ease its grips on other sectors such as payday lending.
