Heavy Hand of Biden Consumer Finance Head

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WSJ

How a D.C. Bureaucrat Amassed Power Over Businesses, Banks and Consumers

WASHINGTON—One of America’s most powerful regulators of business and finance has, at first glance, a relatively small job.

Rohit Chopra’s title is director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which regulates consumer finance. From that perch, he has built substantial sway at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which oversees about 5,000 banks, and the Federal Trade Commission, the antitrust watchdog.

Mr. Chopra, 40, combs laws and regulations searching for old or dormant provisions he can use to advance his policies. He has cultivated a network of former staffers and helped place them in powerful jobs. He embraces rhetoric and tactics some other bureaucrats view as out of bounds, and pillories skeptical colleagues as going easy on industry.

As a result, he is driving the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda in ways few would have imagined, given his title—building a sphere of influence that reaches nearly every U.S. business, bank and consumer.

At the consumer finance bureau, answering to President Biden, Mr. Chopra aims to make the agency more consumer-friendly and more adversarial toward financial firms than it was during the Trump administration. To that end, he has launched a broad review of big technology companies’ use of consumers’ financial data, probed the fast-growing buy-now-pay-later installment-plan industry and called for tougher penalties against financial firms found to repeatedly violate the law.

That post also gives him an FDIC board seat, a role that had been largely ceremonial but which he has used to oust that agency’s Republican chairwoman. That paved the way for Democrats to write policies that could make it more difficult for larger banks to merge, increase lending requirements for banks in lower-income communities and push banks to take into account climate-related risks.