OMB Director Mick Mulvaney answers questions during a press briefing at the White House on March 16, 2017. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s appointee to run the agency tasked with protecting consumers from predatory lending practices, has extensive ties to payday lenders, including $31,700 in donations to his 2016 congressional race and the current work of his former top aide, federal records show.
Some of the payday lenders involved are active opponents of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and have lobbied to rein it in or shut it down entirely. One lobbyist is Al Simpson, the longtime former chief of staff for Mulvaney from his days in Congress. Simpson’s ties to Mulvaney are not listed on his lobbying disclosure forms, even when he lobbied Mulvaney’s OMB.
TYT previously reported that Mulvaney has received campaign donations from a range of commercial banks and financial firms, which, like payday lenders, are regulated by the CFPB.
Mulvaney was named over the weekend by President Trump to serve as CFPB director, just days after the agency’s newly appointed Deputy Director Leandra English, formerly the chief of staff, was also named acting director. A judge on Tuesday ruled that Mulvaney can take charge, but the door remains open to further legal challenges. The agency has had only one director since it was created in 2010 in response to the financial crisis.
As a member of Congress, Mulvaney was a steadfast opponent of financial regulation generally and the CFPB specifically, frequently challenging the agency’s attempts to curtail payday-lending practices. According to data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, Mulvaney’s $31,700 in donations puts him ninth on the list of members of Congress receiving donations from the payday-loan industry, taking in more money than almost all House representatives and all but two senators.
Simpson reportedly got Mulvaney into politics as a South Carolina state legislator and served as Mulvaney’s chief of staff from 2010 through January of this year, shortly before Mulvaney left Congress to take the helm at OMB. That month, Simpson became a managing director of the Washington lobbying powerhouse Mercury Public Affairs.
Mercury’s announcement touted that Simpson’s experience “focused on the health care, energy, and infrastructure sectors.” Since then, Simpson has registered as a lobbyist for seven companies, three of which are financial firms.
One of those firms is Harpeth Financial Services, a payday lender which does business as Advance Financial. Simpson registered as Harpeth’s first and, at the time, only federal lobbyist on September 1, amid mounting speculation that the CFPB’s then-Director Richard Cordray would try to rush through tough new regulations on payday lenders before departing to run for governor of Ohio.
Simpson’s registration form lists only a single issue on which he anticipated lobbying for Harpeth: CFPB reform.
In the month afterward, according to Mercury’s most recent disclosure form, Harpeth paid $10,000 for Simpson to lobby Congress and the Office of Administration about CFPB reform. (The Office of Administration is a White House office that deals with hiring and other administrative functions. The Office of Administration had no director until President Trump on September 28 announced his intention to appoint Marcia Lee Kelly to the post.)
Simpson’s form did not disclose that he used to serve as chief of staff to Mulvaney. Although the Lobbying Disclosure Act requires lobbyists to disclose past work for members of Congress, Simpson’s position as chief of staff is not listed even on forms filed for other clients disclosing he was lobbying Mulvaney’s OMB directly.
The founders of Harpeth are Mike and Tina Hodges, active players in the fight against the CFPB. Last year they accepted an award given to their company by FiSCA, the Financial Services Centers of America. The FiSCA press release lauds the Hodges’ company as “actively involved in speaking out against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) attempts to discontinue the payday loan industry.”
Last year, Harpeth lawyers submitted a letter of comment to the CFPB opposing new rules on payday lending. The letter says that Harpeth’s annual interest rate on its “FLEX Loan . . . significantly exceeds 36 percent.” The letter asserts that the CFPB lacks “authority to establish a usury limit.”
At a Febuary 11, 2016, House Financial Services hearing on the CFPB—attended by Mulvaney, who sat on the committee—Robert Sherrill testified that payday loans helped him establish his business when commercial banks refused to lend to him. Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas) said the payday lender was owned by the Hodges and then asked Sherrill to attest to their character.
Neither Sherrill nor Williams mentioned that Sherrill’s company reportedly relied on Harpeth for about 80 percent of its business. The month after Sherrill’s testimony, Mike Hodges gave Williams a $1,000 donation, with another $2,500 this past summer. A Harpeth website later reposted a Breitbart article about Sherrill’s testimony that was critical of the CFPB.
Both Mike and Tina Hodges sit on the board of directors for FiSCA, which hosted Mulvaney as its keynote speaker eight months later, according to a FiSCA publication.
Neither of the Hodges has donated directly to Mulvaney, but they are prodigious donors to PACs and other committees that funded Mulvaney. According to data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, Harpeth made more political donations in the 2016 election cycle than any other payday lender by far.
FiSCA alone gave $10,000 to Mulvaney’s 2016 campaign—making the group one of Mulvaney’s top ten donors.
Another Simpson client, Movement Mortgage, has publicly praised the CFPB. Some of its executives, however, donated thousands of dollars last year to Mulvaney, despite the fact that they lived in North Carolina. The company moved its headquarters in 2015 to Mulvaney’s district.
The Intercept reported earlier this week that a Trump administration legal memo asserting Trump’s right to appoint Mulvaney was written by a lawyer who represented a Canadian payday lender against the CFPB just last year.
As head of the CFPB, Mulvaney will oversee policy and individual cases that could impact other institutions besides payday lenders but also may pose conflicts of interest.
Mulvaney’s single top donor last year was NVR, a construction company whose mortgage arm has dozens of complaints on record with the CFPB from consumers including servicemembers and the elderly.
International Business Times reported on Sunday that Mulvaney’s second chief of staff, Natalee Binkholder, is now a lobbyist for Santander, a bank reportedly in CFPB’s crosshairs after having previously run afoul of the agency.
TYT’s report earlier this week found that Grupo Salinas, a Mexican company that owns the largest payday loan chain in the U.S., contributed $5,000 to Mulvaney’s campaign last year. After last month’s rollout of proposed new CFPB rules on payday loans, a spokesperson for the lender called on President Trump to “intercede.”