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Battle Over Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Leadership Ending

Challenge to Mick Mulvaney dropped

Office of Management and Budget Director Rep. Mick Mulvaney has been acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Office of Management and Budget Director Rep. Mick Mulvaney has been acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)

Leandra English has indicated she will leave her position at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week, ending a legal contest over the directorship of the bureau that has been an ongoing political drama in Washington since the day after Thanksgiving.

In tweets on Friday, English said she would be “stepping down from my position” at the bureau, and her attorney, Deepak Gupta, said that English would drop her appeal of a federal judge’s denial of her motion for a permanent injunction. The injunction she sought would have barred Acting Director Mick Mulvaney from running the agency and instead installed English in the top spot.

“Now that President Trump has decided to seek Senate confirmation of a new Director for the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Ms. English is stepping down and we intend to file court papers on Monday to bring the litigation to a close,” Gupta said in a tweet.

In June, Trump chose Kathy Kraninger, who is currently associate director of the Office of Management and Budget where Mulvaney is also the director, as his nominee to be the CFPB’s permanent director.

Mulvaney has been acting director since the late November resignation of Richard Cordray, who, on his last day, named English as deputy director. A provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that established the CFPB calls for the deputy director to take over in the director’s absence.

A federal judge, though, found that law was superseded by the federal law  under which Mulvaney was installed as the bureau’s acting director.

Over the last seven months, congressional Democrats have repeatedly referred to English as the agency’s director. She has been prominently listed on the CFPB’s website as the agency’s deputy director, although Mulvaney, at a Senate Banking hearing in April, said he had never met her. 

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