The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established by Congress in 2010.

The Bureau is charged with protecting consumers from predatory practices by financial institutions.

This was one of the responses to the 2008 financial crisis.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that could decide the CFPB's fate,

along with the status of several other federal agencies like the Federal Reserve.

But there is a bigger context here.

There are lots of conservatives who have long opposed the modern administrative state,

and they've previously challenged laws that say heads of agencies can only be fired for cause.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has agreed, and it struck down a bunch of these provisions

saying that these independent agencies are essentially creatures of the executive branch.

That is NPR Legal Affairs correspondent Nina Tottenberg.

So the president has to be able to fire at will, not just for cause.

But while those decisions did change the who in terms of who runs these agencies,

it didn't take away the agency's powers.

Now comes a lower court decision that essentially invalidates the whole mission

of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB.

Okay, so just to explain some more,

last fall, a panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals,

ruled that the CFPB's funding is unconstitutional because it gets its money from the Federal Reserve,

which is in turn funded by bank fees.

In other words, according to that appeals court ruling,

if funding for a federal agency like the CFPB is not appropriated annually by Congress,

...