NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday named Brian Johnson as his choice to be the next director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, turning to a trusted former aide and financial services executive who helped run the CFPB during his first term to now run the bureau for the rest of his second term in office. Johnson was the deputy director of the bureau under Trump’s first CFPB director, Kathy Kraninger, and was known for being a powerful aide to Kraninger during her tenure who had significant leeway in deciding what the bureau should or should not work on. Since leaving the CFPB in 2020, Johnson worked at Patomak Global Partners and was most recently a senior executive at the credit card giant Capital One. If confirmed by the Senate, Johnson will inherit a bureau that’s largely been inoperable since Trump came back into office and put his budget director, Russell Vought, in charge on an acting basis. Much of the bureau’s recent activity has directed at unwinding its previous work.
Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, designed to operate as an independent financial regulator with broad enforcement authority over consumer financial products and services. Republicans have long seen the CFPB as an agency with too much centralized power and unaccountable to Congress, and they have repeatedly attempted to diminish it since its creation.
