Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Interim Chief - Elizabeth Warren

On September 17th, at the White House, President Barack Obama announced the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as an Assistant to the President and Special Adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury. This decision will allow Elizabeth Warren to act as an interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and will enable her to begin setting up the agency immediately. The recently signed Dodd-Frank financial reform law gives the Treasury temporary oversight of the bureau until an official director is named. The Harvard law professor's new appointment does not require the approval of the Senate.

This appointment as the interim head of the CFPB will not give her the power to start drafting regulations, but will allow her to set up the CFPB public policies, hire employees, establish legal departments and find office space. She will also set up a complaint center for consumers, which consumer advocacy groups say is an important first step in enforcing the new consumer protections contemplated by the new Dodd-Frank legislation.

The CFPB, the “watchdog agency” established under the new Dodd-Frank law, will set rules on credit cards, mortgages and other financial products in order to protect consumer’s interests. But The White House said that Warren will have a broad array of duties, advising President Obama on "policies and programs that are designed to protect the financial interests of middle-class families". She will be responsible for organizing the powerful new consumer agency – the CFPB, which Warren first suggested in 2007. Warren will have 10 months to accomplish the task. The Treasury Department has indicated that existing enforcement, examination and rule-writing authority would be targeted to transfer to the CFPB by July 21, 2011. The Act gave the Treasury between six to twelve months to transfer these powers, and the transfer date can be extended to a later time if the Treasury Secretary decides additional time is needed.

Warren became an influential outside advocate for including a consumer-protection agency in what would become the Dodd-Frank bill. The CFPB is designed to protect consumers from predatory loans and make consumer credit easier to understand and access. After the appointment, Warren wrote on the White House's blog, "The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn't learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them, way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. The CFPB is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices. "

Elizabeth Warren is a professor of Law at Harvard University with an extensive background in finance and economics. She has written nine books (one of them the bestseller "The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke") and hundreds of scholarly articles, and is known as a champion of consumers. She was the Chief Adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, and she was appointed as the first academic member of the Federal Judicial Education Committee. She has served as a member of the Commission on Economic Inclusion established by the FDIC, and has served on the steering committees of the Tobin Project and the National Bankruptcy Conference. Prior to accepting her appointment to the new position, Warren was head of the Congressional Oversight Panel to monitor the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).