AX CFPB’S TPS REPORTS: According to the (excellent) legal eagles David Rifkin and Andrew Grossman, new Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney can use the oft-overlooked Paperwork Reduction Act to nullify many of his predecessor’s regulations (paywall likely):

Federal agencies are eager to impose paperwork burdens on citizens and businesses. It costs an agency almost nothing to impose a new record-keeping requirement or reporting mandate. The expense falls on those required to carry it out. The obvious solution was to put agencies on a paperwork budget and force them to internalize the costs they foist on the public.

To ensure that agencies don’t evade that responsibility, the PRA established robust centralized oversight in the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House. Every “information collection request” issued or imposed by a federal agency must be approved by OMB. That includes government forms as well as requirements that private parties collect information. If OMB disapproves a request, the agency cannot enforce it…

The CFPB was designed to be an independent agency, but unlike the others it has a single director. The PRA limits the ability to overrule to “an independent regulatory agency which is administered by two or more members.” So OMB can disapprove any action by the bureau that imposes unnecessary or excessive paperwork burdens, without fear of being overruled.

Mr. Mulvaney should exercise that power. Every single provision of the short-term lending rule is structured around information collection requests subject to the PRA. The rule’s central requirement is that lenders determine a borrower’s ability to repay by demanding financial information from the borrower, verifying it, and then recording the result of various calculations. Each step is its own paperwork burden.

It’s a burden that the CFPB admits will destroy 80% of the short-term lending industry.