The Wall Street Journal has called on President Trump to dismiss Rohit Chopra from his position as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Chopra, a Biden administration appointee and a political ally of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), did not resign from his position when the Trump administration began. In an editorial titled “Why Is Rohit Chopra Still Employed at the CFPB?”, the Journal claimed Chopra was trying to “ingratiate himself with [Vice President] JD Vance in hopes of serving out his term.”
The Journal noted that “Chopra didn’t receive a single Republican Senate vote when he was confirmed in September 2021” and blamed him for creating “a coup against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair and Trump appointee, Jelena McWilliams” while later using his board seat at the FDIC by “pushing overreaching rules such as revisions to the Community Reinvestment Act, which a federal court blocked.”
“The list of Mr. Chopra’s regulatory assaults on business is long,” the Journal complained. “He has sought to impose de facto diversity quotas on mortgage lenders under the guise of preventing red-lining. He has used the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which regulates how credit agencies collect and use consumer data, to regulate employer background checks and employee-monitoring software to make it harder to fire unproductive workers. Last autumn he promulgated an “open banking” rule that requires banks and credit card companies to share customer data at no cost with a third party such as a fintech app upon a customer’s request. The rule is a gift to con artists. Although Mr. Chopra pretends to be a friend of small business and startups, most of his enforcement actions have been against small companies.”
The Journal added that keeping Chopra at the CFPB would result in the presence of “a source of internal opposition to Mr. Trump’s deregulatory agenda. His populist soundings on finance mask a progressive who dislikes markets and business.”
