President Obama’s actions allowed Warren to bypass what would have been a lengthy Senate confirmation hearing and give her the same authority as if she had been appointed Director of the CFPB. Senate Republicans indicated throughout the summer that they would be intractably against Warren being appointed to the post of Director of the CFPB.
Warren will be in charge of crafting new regulations that will govern all manner of financial products that range from mortgages to credit cards. According to President Obama, Warren, a former Harvard Law professor, first came up with the idea for the CFPB as a way of simplifying financial regulations for consumers.
Warren formally chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel, which managed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). She has recently declared that her first priority will be to overhaul credit card rules, which she describes as “long” and “hard to read.”
The CFPB is expected to be built along the lines of other consumer 
protection agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration. The 
Obama Administration has placed an emphasis on the CFPB creating regulations to protect consumers, and not the working for the active 
promotion of economic growth initiatives, which are being left to other components of President Obama’s economic program.
Contained within this drive for consumer first service and clarity of commercial language is an expansive mandate to guard consumers from the threat of exorbitant fees, nebulous contacts, and deceptive practices. This effectively grants the CFPB extensive powers to define standards, guidelines and fiscal practices for America’s 
entire financial sector with an emphasis on the automotive sales, real estate and financial institutions with less than $10 billion in assets.
Such expansive powers given to the CFPB function as part of a larger package contained with the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer 
Protection Act passed this July. The CFPB, established under Title 10 
of Dodd-Frank, is only one out of several new agencies and initiatives
created in response to the economic recession the United States
experienced as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.
President Obama’s vision for the CFPB is that of an enforcer for the 
general provisions of Dodd-Frank. Thus, Warren’s first tasks in shaping the CFPB will be to determine the general guidelines and practices for 
America’s financial sector to follow as well as to set finesand 
penalties for financial institutions, which fail to abide by those 
guidelines.
In order to carry out that mandate, the CFPB will be directly attached to the Federal Reserve (Fed) but remain autonomous in all operations. The CFPB will only be subject to the control of the executive branch 
according to the terms of the Dodd-Frank, with a Financial Stability 
Oversight Council being created within the Treasury Department to 
review and if needed overrule the decisions of the CFPB.
Though members of the Federal Reserve Board – the governing body of the Fed comprised of Presidential appointees – can act independently of the executive branch as a result of their 14- year renewable terms of office, the new authority of the CFPB in determining overall financial 
regulatory policy will subject policies of the Fed to their review and 
by extension to the control of the executive branch.
Simplified, the power structure established by Dodd-Frank grants the executive branch, through the auspices of the Treasury 
Department’s oversight of the CFPB and her consumer protection powers, 
the ability to influence the banking policies of the Fed if they affect areas of the financial sector that Dodd-Frank grants oversight 
to the CFPB.
In practical terms this could allow the CFPB to undermine the 
independence of the Fed. Policies such as setting the nationwide 
interest rate could now be subject to political considerations because 
of the oversight relationships created by Dodd-Frank. This prospect 
has sent both Wall Street and the Republican Party on the attack, warning that the extensiveness of the CFPB’s mandate will take years 
to settle.
The American public remains dismissive of both Republican and 
Democratic economic proposals.
A Gallup Poll taken August 11 that focused on issue by issue approval ratings indicated that 59 percent of Americans disapproved of 
President Obama’s economic plans. Another Gallup Poll taken September 15 showed that 54 percent of Americans expect the economy to be the 
same or worse in a year’s time.
These polls indicate a general disapproval among Americans for both 
President Obama’s economic policies such as the CFPB and the 
alternative economic policies offered by the Republicans such as extending the Bush era tax cuts.
In spite of these indicators of public disapproval, both Democrats and Republicans show no signs of abandoning the policies they have 
proposed to solve America’s economic problems.