This afternoon, President Obama announced that Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren has been appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
This afternoon, President Obama announced that Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren has been appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. In this role, she will build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB], the centerpiece of the new Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul law. Ms. Warren was the first to call for the creation of such an agency in 2007. The CFPB budget could be as large as $500 million. Warren’s role as senior advisor is currently loosely defined, allowing President Obama’s appointment to avoid confirmation by the Senate.
“If a Democratic President can’t even attempt confirmation with a 59 seat Democratic majority in the Senate, Ms. Warren is clearly not only unpalatable to conservatives, but to a large number of liberals as well. How convenient that the President’s announcement comes on a Friday afternoon, as soon as the Senate, who is supposed to ‘advise and consent,’ has left town,” said Congressman McHenry. “Ms. Warren just adds to the list of this White House’s unchecked fleet of czars. Her increased proximity to this President and loosely defined role will only make the creation of this new bureaucracy harder to track and further shielded from proper Congressional oversight. This is a continuation of a troubling pattern of avoiding disclosure and Senate confirmation.”
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