After becoming an official member of the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren spoke with bloggers on a conference call. While policy specifics were lacking, it is clear from both Obama's remarks announcing the appointment in the Rose Garden and Warren's own comments that, as I wrote this morning, Warren will most likely not be the permanent director of the CFPB but does intends to push for a broad role in government herself. She mentioned that she will be regularly meeting with the president and his economic team on a broad array of issues, referenced a conversation with fellow Wall Street Sheriff SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, and noted a scheduled working lunch with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
I asked Warren how clear Treasury's authority over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is prior to the appointment of a permanent director -- the Dodd-Frank bill is somewhat vague over its ability to perform certain functions during the transition period. My understanding is that most of her administrative focus will be on putting together the people and agencies that will constitute the new bureau and promoting it publicly. "It's clear that it's designed to give Treasury the authority to get this agency going and not to wait," she says. "I will have the authority to hire, to fire, to set the budget, to do things that are necessary to get the agency started."
Warren began the call with a telling anecdote: The first person in government she talked to about the CFPB was then-Senator Barack Obama in December 2006, and the interest from his office, including his policy director Karen Kornbluh, played a role in her development of the idea and the influential article that followed and set the tone for the public debate over consumer protection. While the clock is now ticking on Warren's time as the de facto head of the CFPB, her role in government may not end there, especially with no other senior women on the White House economic team.
-- Tim Fernholz
