ProPublica lists Robert Bowes as having served as field director for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration. He is the author of the chapter in The Mandate for Leadership concerning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Unsurprisingly, Bowes has harsh words for the bureau, which was, as its name implies, created to be the friend of the little guy, aka the ordinary consumer who is very much on unequal footing with banks and financial institutions. Bowes describes the bureau as “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits.” The irony that roughly 100 dark money, far-right nonprofits are behind Project 2025 appears to escape Bowes. It is not clear what Bowes means by “leftist nonprofits.” Perhaps he is referring to groups that receive money from the bureau’s civil penalty fund “for the purpose of consumer education and financial literacy programs.” It is not leftist but rather politically neutral to provide consumer education and financial literacy programs.
By “shakedown,” Bowes means that the CFPB penalizes banks and other financial institutions when they break the law. Since the CFPB acts on complaints, it is very much a stretch to compare that to a cop’s stopping and searching someone on the street, without having received a complaint, in order to drum up a criminal charge. Also, of course, the funding that results from the CFPB’s actions is not “unaccountable” but rather accounted for, as its website shows.
Regarding Bowes’s language mischaracterizing the CFPB, it is typical of The Mandate for Leadership to use hyperbolic, factually false, and highly partisan language when attacking perceived adversaries. For example: “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” “transgender extremists,” “anti–fossil fuel agenda,” “war on fossil fuels,” “the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels,” that the DOJ that would “chill the free speech rights of parents” who make threats at school board meetings while supposedly failing to “protect the rights of Americans who actually were terrorized” by “violence” against “pregnancy care centers” (aka fake medical providers that exist to talk women out of getting abortions), and so on.
With this pattern of deceptive language in mind, it becomes easier to read between the lines as Bowes maligns the CFPB. For example, he writes: “In 2015…Investor’s Business Daily accused the CFPB of ‘diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party.’” How is this to be interpreted? One item at a time. First is the source: Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), a news source that makes the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal look fair and balanced. The Media Bias Fact Check site has this to say about IBD: “a questionable source with the promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories and numerous failed fact checks.”
Next is the word “accused.” Accused is not “demonstrated” or “showed” or some other word that implies strong evidence. “Potentially” is another word that hints at the claim being vague. As for “alleged” victims of lending bias, the CFPB only collects money from agencies that have broken the law, at which point the victims are not “alleged” victims but simply victims. As for “slush fund,” a more neutral term would be simply “fund.” As for “poverty groups,” is being a group that helps the poor (perhaps with financial literacy education) a bad thing? And what exactly are those ties to the Democratic party? The implication is that the CFPB is directly funding a branch of the Democratic party, while the reality could be that, for example, the CFPB has granted some funds to a consumer-friendly organization that has some completely legitimate affiliation or indirect tie to a branch of the Democratic party.
Surprisingly, Bowes does not advocate for the outright elimination of the CFPB. He instead proposes a variety of measures that would effectively constrict the bureau’s ability to advocate on behalf of consumers. Recently, the CFPB survived a legal challenge to its existence made by such entities as payday lenders. That does not mean, however, that forces on the right, with the backing of financial institutions opposed to the interests of ordinary consumers, have given up the fight against the CFPB.
