A Fighting Chance

As I settled into my new job, I embarked on another round of visits to Congress. I wasn’t a political pro, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot of people were gunning for the agency to fail. I figured it was a good idea to talk to anyone in Congress who was willing to meet with me.

The early conversations had one element in common: Behind closed doors, both Republicans and Democrats said they understood that the country’s credit markets weren’t working. No one disputed that too many people had gotten cheated—they just disagreed over the right response.

One meeting in particular stands out. Spencer Bachus had represented Alabama’s Sixth Congressional District for nearly twenty years. He had a smooth southern accent and a thin smile. During the height of the financial crisis, he was privately briefed by top government officials. The news was bad: The economy was on the brink of collapse. The congressman’s response? According to 60 Minutes, he shorted the market, and in a couple of days he nearly doubled his money. And now he was the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, which meant that he was next in line to be chairman of the committee if his party took back the House in the November elections.

The congressman agreed to meet with me soon after I took the CFPB post. He spoke movingly about people who had been swindled; he really seemed to feel their pain. He concluded by saying that if he had more courage, he’d go after the people who did that to families. In other words, if he stood up for the families who’d been hurt, he could find himself sidelined in Congress by the leadership of his own party. I was stunned by his use of the word courage and his small, tight smile.

As Congressman Bachus ushered me out of his office, he took my arm and leaned close to me. “I’ll go after the consumer agency, but I hope you understand, it isn’t personal.” He said it in a quiet, gentle tone, with his accent twanging through each syllable.

I took him to mean that he didn’t particularly disagree with the idea behind the agency. But politics was politics, and he was warning me that the agency would stay in the line of fire.

I thought that it may not be personal for you, but it is personal for me.





Airing the Dirty Laundry

The political knives were out, but we pushed on.

Everyone on the team understood what a special opportunity we had. We talked a lot about a twenty-first-century agency. We had a chance to build something really innovative and cutting-edge and maybe even reimagine parts of the federal government.

We started with the consumer complaint hotline.

Okay, complaint hotlines don’t exactly sound “cutting-edge” (more like “really boring to talk about”). But we were required by law to create one, and we got down to business right away to make sure it would be operational by the following summer.

First we had to answer a few questions. Should we create the hotline ourselves, or should we ask another government agency to run it? Should we outsource it to a private company? How much should we budget?

Everyone had an opinion, and most people had two or three. We spun our wheels for a few weeks, trying to fit the pieces together. One day I asked a different question: “What will the complaint hotline really do?”

After a little eyeball rolling, someone finally answered, “Uh, it’ll take complaints.”

I figured we could be stupid for a while. “Uh-huh. And what will we do with the complaints?”

“Uh, take them.”

“Take them where?”

“Oh, uh, make a record.”

“And then what?”

“Uh, what what?”

The conversation got dumber, but we eventually got to the key point: A lot of government agencies collect complaints from consumers, but to those who complained, the process often seems like a dead end. Angry consumers file complaints and nothing seems to happen.

I worried about the government’s consumer complaint departments. Rarely is an agency in Washington held accountable based on the quality of its response to consumer complaints. Agency budgets are perpetually tight, and the consumer complaint hotline can be an easy target for cuts. Besides, all government agencies face a basic problem with their complaint hotlines: No one has the resources to conduct an investigation every time a consumer has a problem. Even if an agency could help solve a problem for, say, one in one hundred people, the other ninety-nine consumers would always feel nothing had been done for them.

So the process for handling complaints too often evolved into little more than filling out a form and putting it on a stack of other forms. If the stack got high enough, maybe someone at the agency would investigate some particularly awful problem. But the vast majority of the other complaints would just lie there until they quietly expired.