Bloomberg reports that:
The U.S. Supreme Court seemed inclined to give the president more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the justices considered whether Congress went too far in trying to insulate the agency from political pressure.
Hearing arguments in Washington Tuesday, the court’s conservatives suggested they agreed with Trump administration contentions that the Constitution requires the president to have broad ability to fire the agency’s director. When Congress set up the agency, it gave the director a five-year term and said the person could be ousted only for specified reasons.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that the current CFPB director, an appointee of President Donald Trump, is serving a term that will last until the end of 2023. “The head of this agency will go at least three or four years into the next president’s term, and the next president might have a completely different conception of consumer financial regulatory issues, yet will be able to do nothing about it,” Kavanaugh said.
Back in 2018 when he was still on the DC Circuit, then Judge Kavanaugh dissented in a CFPB case. In that case, he cited yours truly:
As compared to a single-Director independent agency structure, a multi-member independent agency structure—and its inherent requirement for compromise and consensus—will tend to lead to decisions that are not as extreme, idiosyncratic, or otherwise off the rails. Cf. Stephen M. Bainbridge, Why a Board? Group Decisionmaking in Corporate Governance, 55 Vand. L. Rev. 1, 12-19 (2002).
PHH Corp. v. Consumer Fin. Protec. Bureau, 881 F.3d 75, 184 (D.C. Cir. 2018). It's not clear to me whether the current case will end up tackling the multimember issue. but one hopes so.
