This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 29th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a new temporary director, Mick Mulvaney, but it took legal action to determine

if he take over.

The strange and revealing fight over the powers of CFPB shows its structure is basically incompatible with the Constitution and proper

accountability. Cato's Thea Brook Knight comments.

Does what this judge has to say about CFPB and who is the rightful heir to the

helm of that agency does that actually end this as a matter of dispute?

Not really, no.

This ruling was on what's called the temporary restraining order

or TRO.

This is a sort of emergency action that can be taken where usually there's some sort of imminent harm where the parties rush to the courthouse and get the judge to issue a ruling to stop something that's going to happen right away.

So this is really a sort of preliminary step.

It's not an action that's appealable, but this does not mean that English can't take

further legal action to try to pursue her claim. And Miss English of course is the

the person who was designated by Mr Cordray as he was, has decided to leave CFPB the Friday after

Thanksgiving, he decided to leave and had designated his chief of staff as assistant director and

then she would become director at presumably at that point.

So Richard Cordray who is the director of the CFPB, had announced earlier in November

that he would be leaving at the end of the month.

His term would end in July, but there are speculations that he might be pursuing other options right now,

and so he decided that he was going to step down before the end of the month.

And he had not at that point announced a specific day, but the president has started talking about how his intention was to appoint his director of OMB as the interim acting director of the CFPB. So the director of the CFPB, this is a position

...