>Its structure included a director that could not be fired by the President except for cause, and the ability to request funding from the Federal Reserve rather than the United States Congress
I mean, that does sound pretty insane
I mean, that does sound pretty insane
This would also challenge the federal reserve structure.
The Fed is tasked with financial regulation, and did some of the work of the CFPB before it was created.
By design the Fed is independent, including funding, from Congress. If you're curious why, there's lots of history around how and why a central bank was created... dating all the way bank to Andrew Hamilton.
This is the same as the FTC and others.
"This Court, as the majority acknowledges, has sustained the constitutionality of the FTC and similar in- dependent agencies. See ante, at 2, 13–16. The for-cause protections for the heads of those agencies, the Court has found, do not impede the President’s ability to perform his own constitutional duties, and so do not breach the separation of powers."
So it’s independent of both the President and Congress.
It’s more independent than many courts.
What could possibly go wrong?
They might accidentally get something done that helps people?
> They might accidentally get something done that helps people?
Since you're missing the point: make me dictator, so I can finally get stuff done that helps people.
Too much independence is a recipe for serious problems, even if (theoretically) it could be used accomplish major things.
This is for both reasons of public scrutiny (there's so much in the budget that it's easy for things to get relatively lost), but also because the budget, in practice, just needs 50+1 votes. Usual laws need 60 due to Senate procedures. Ignoring the House since there's not much difference there.
So the CFPB--a bureau within the federal reserve--cannot be funded by the federal reserve?
So it’s independent of both the President and Congress.
Just like the federal reserve.
The federal reserve doesn't just set interest rates and lend money... they're also tasked with regulation of the financial system. So it makes sense that the CF(inancial)PB would be part of it. In fact, the creation of the CFPB was just the consolidation of work done by several bureaus, including the federal reserve. Kind of like when DHS was created--just a reorganization.
No, its not; the Fed has a board of five commissioners, not a single director. This is rather the norm for independent executive-branch agencies with leadership that can be removed only for cause.
Is there a specific Constitutional requirement for a board as well as a Chair if it's for-cause-only?
Because otherwise that seems like a very narrow difference to ask the Court to rule on regarding the appointment/firing of the head...
Well, no.
The specific rule is that for-cause-only removal is inconsistent in general with the vesting of executive power in the President in Article II, with two exceptions:
(1) Agencies with a role similar to that of the FTC in 1935 that exercise no part of the executive power but serve solely as a legislative/judicial aid, and
(2) Inferior officers (not principal officers of agencies) with limited duties and no policymaking role.
(While each of these rules comes from separate lines of cases, they were summarized together and referenced in support of the decision by which the Supreme Court struck down the for-cause-only rule at the CFPB [0], which specifically found that the for-cause-only provision combined with the single-director structure would clearly violate separation of powers as a reason not to further extent the existing exceptions to the prohibition of for-cause-only restrictions to allow the one at the CFPB.)
> Because otherwise that seems like a very narrow difference to ask the Court to rule on regarding the appointment/firing of the head…
The Court has already ruled against that, the present challenge is to the funding structure.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-7_new_bq7d.pd...
In most western nations the top civil servant and all those below them are non-partisan career civil servants that keep the ship running at all times and have better employment protections than the average employee (which already requires for cause in those countries).
A new Minister’s (Secretary in US parlance) role is mainly that of someone who plots a course and the civil servants in the ministry try to follow it.
As a side note, the concept or “government shutdown” is also entirely foreign in those countries, if not outright ridiculous.
For example, they might create an Administration of Land Management with authority over all extraction rights on federal land, funded by fees paid for those rights, and with a director the President cannot remove except for cause.
And it wouldn't be possible for Democrats to change that until they too won the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time.
A government full of agencies like that would make elections mostly irrelevant, and things would change only when one party won everything.
Many also have a House of Lords or Bundesrat or something similar that is not elected by the people, whose purpose is to make the government less democratic. We should not try to be more like those governments.
Of those that remain, how many have agencies not subject to the chief executive like the CFPB?