Nominate Elizabeth Warren to Serve as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

Recipient: President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President: 

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, we urge you to nominate Elizabeth Warren to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Professor Warren will serve America well, not just by making sure that badly-needed consumer protections are in place, but also by working to ensure that we have a vital and functional financial industry that advances our nation’s economic interests. 

We were proud to join you, Professor Warren, and many other allies at last year’s historic signing ceremony for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The promise of the reforms contained in this landmark financial reform law, however, will be determined in large measure by how the regulators flesh out the details of the new law. Nowhere is this truer than within the CFPB, where the first director will have a lasting impact on the agency’s success.   

We believe that the clear and best choice to be this first director is Elizabeth Warren.  She has the requisite knowledge, experience, stature, and commitment to maximize the CFPB’s effectiveness. At the same time, she has a demonstrated appreciation for the value of a well- functioning financial market. She recognizes that the nation’s prosperity – both in the aggregate, and for individual small businesses, homeowners, consumers, and others – is dependent on a thriving and healthy industry. The Leadership Conference believes she will bring to the position a lifetime of devotion to protecting the financial well-being of all Americans – and, more recently, more than enough hands-on experience necessary to show that she will get the job done right, as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) as well as in her role in getting the CFPB up and running.  

For these reasons, we respectfully urge you to nominate Professor Warren to serve as the first director of the CFPB. If necessary, given the fast-approaching effective date of the CFPB, and given the unprecedented vow by Senate Republicans – most of whom opposed your financial reform efforts all along – to block the confirmation of any CFPB director, we believe you would be justified in using your authority, as enumerated in the Constitution, to appoint Professor Warren on a temporary basis during the next Congressional recess.       

Thank you for your consideration.  If you have any questions, please contact Rob Randhava, Senior Counsel at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, at (202) 466-6058.

Wade Henderson
President & CEO

Nancy Zirkin
Executive Vice President