Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray will step down by the end of the month, the regulator told employees in a letter Wednesday.
“As I have said many times, but feel just as much today as I ever have, it has been a joy of my life to have the opportunity to serve our country as the first director of the consumer bureau by working alongside all of you here,” Cordray wrote.
Cordray, an Obama appointee, is rumored to be eyeing a run for governor in his home state of Ohio as a Democrat. His term runs through next summer, but congressional Republicans have long sought his ouster.
Although his departure was long rumored among financial services lobbyists, Cordray stayed at the agency long enough to finalize major new rules on payday lending and class-action lawsuits against financial companies, the latter of which was subsequently struck down by the Republican-led Congress.
President Trump had resisted Republican calls to fire Cordray, reportedly out of fear that doing so could raise Cordray’s profile on the Left by making him a martyr.
“We are long overdue for new leadership at the CFPB, a rogue agency that has done more to hurt consumers than help them,” said House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the leading GOP critic of the bureau and Cordray.
Cordray is the first director of the agency, created in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law to police financial markets for consumer abuse.
Republicans have long aimed to curb the agency’s powers and objected particularly to Cordray’s pursuit of new rules on consumer products. Trump will now appoint his successor.
“I trust that new leadership will see that value also and work to preserve it — perhaps in different ways than before, but desiring, as I have done, to serve in ways that benefit and strengthen our economy and our country,” Cordray wrote in the letter.
