@zoocoup
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,
who lasted all of one week as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the firing of Rohit Chopra,
had already shut down most of the #CFPB’s day-to-day functions last Monday.
He even added a gift to Big Tech a day later, 
by stopping the CFPB from designating companies with payment apps for supervision.
But #Vought took this a step further.
His midnight memo repeated #Bessent’s pause on rulemaking, enforcement actions, settlements, public communications, and litigation,
-- but added that the bureau must
“cease all supervision and examination immediately”
and “cease all stakeholder engagement.”
He also changed Bessent’s directive to “not commence, take additional investigative activities related to, or settle enforcement actions,”
by adding that CFPB cannot
“open any new investigation in any manner, and cease any pending investigations.”
All of these are bad, but the supervision restriction is particularly incendiary.
As former CFPB official Julie Margetta Morgan explains, supervision is the lifeblood of any financial regulator,
the “first line of defense against scammers, predatory banks, and tech companies stealing your financial data.”
This takes hundreds of examiners who oversee financial firms out of the field,
leaving the multi-trillion-dollar consumer financial markets exposed and ripe for scam artists.
It also means that small community banks are now regulated more than big banks.
As part of a political compromise during the creation of the CFPB, it supervises only banks with more than $10 billion in assets.
The other banking regulators handle banks under $10 billion.
Since the other regulators are still active, smaller banks are the only ones being checked right now for compliance with things like the Truth in Lending Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and more.
This could threaten competition, since big banks will for the time being have lower compliance costs and a freer rein to profit from cheating customers.
The playing field was just unbalanced in favor of the big banks.
The Independent Community Bankers of America, which welcomed Vought as acting director on Saturday, did not respond to a request for comment.
-- David Dayen
at The American Prospect.
️Voice of America (VOA), 
testing the limits of his authoritative power as he seeks to shrink the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy.
It's funny how 
"The Trump Executive Orders as “Radical Constitutionalism”"
