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Rohit Chopra became the third director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Thursday, after the Senate approved his nomination on a 50-48 party line vote.
Chopra, who previously served on the Federal Trade Commission, was nominated to replace the Donald Trump appointee Kathy Kraninger, who resigned in January at the request of President Joe Biden.
The confirmation ends a contentious partisan process after every Republican on the Senate Banking Committee voted against his candidacy, resulting in a 12-12 tie on the panel. Current Senate rules allow the Senate majority leader to offer a motion to advance nominees when committees are deadlocked, given that Democrats and Republicans have equal representation on committees in a evenly split Senate.
The very existence of the CFPB remains a partisan issue. The agency was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with a mandate to set standards for consumer protection in the financial industry and to enforce federal consumer financial law.
Republicans have long objected to the agency being led by a single director, as opposed to a commission with representation from members of both parties. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that a provision in the law establishing the agency, which said the director could only be removed for cause and not at the discretion of the president, was unconstitutional.
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey objected to Chopra’s confirmation in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday. “I have grave concerns that Commissioner Chopra would return the CFPB to the lawless, overreaching, highly politicized agency it was during the Obama administration,” the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said . “The CFPB was created by Democrats through the Dodd-Frank Act as arguably the most unaccountable agency in the history of the federal government.”
Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, chairman of the banking panel, voiced his strong support of the nomination, saying that Chopra “will be America’s voice and America’s advocate.”
The agency was the brainchild of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who first proposed its establishment while she was a Harvard Law School professor in 2007. Chopra helped Warren stand up the agency in 2010 and 2011 and served as its first student loan ombudsman.
Under his leadership, the CFPB is expected to take a tough stance on student loan servicers, payday lenders and to issue new rules regulating bank overdraft fees. “We are sometimes not doing enough to hold businesses accountable when it comes to the harms they cause, even when it’s an outright violation of the law,” Chopra said during his March confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee.
Chopra’s confirmation leaves the FTC with a 2-2 partisan split, at least until the Senate is able to take up the nomination of privacy advocate Alvaro Bedoya to replace him.
