By Charlene Crowell, NNPA Newswire Contributor
America’s 1.29 million member-strong, all-volunteer military includes men and women from all 50 states, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. Regardless of race or ethnicity, each made a choice and swore an oath to protect our nation. Together, they wear our nation’s uniforms and carry our flag on assignments and deployments in times of both peace and war.
I’d like to believe that our entire nation respects and appreciates their sacrificing service that takes them away from families, our stateside, and deployments. Further, while these brave men and women protect us, the nation should also protect them – including the clutches of predatory lending.
It was that kind of perspective that led to strong bipartisan enactment in 2006 of the Military Lending Act (MLA), a reform that was strongly supported by the Department of Defense. At the time, DoD warned how severe financial stress diminished “military readiness.” Years later, with the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), MLA enforcement was assigned to the new agency along with other laws, and MLA was updated to include the phrase, “shall be enforced by the CFPB”. That kind of language eliminates discretion or interpretation, thereby ensuring appropriate actions when warranted.
For years, CFPB’s enforcement levied fines against businesses that broke consumer finance laws and made consumers financially whole with proportional restitution. From July 2011 through September 2017, CFPB’s Office of Servicemember Affairs delivered $130 million of financial relief as a result of actions taken on 91,482 military complaints filed. In just one lending area — payday loans — CFPB projected that servicemembers saved $35 million every year as a result of MLA rules.
Justification for continued aggressive enforcement is attested to in CFPB’s own reports. From 2016 to 2017, CFPB recorded a 47% increase in the number of servicemember complaints. The following year, 2017 to 2018, the number of complaints were still rising at 12%.
According to the Pentagon, military members can and do lose security clearances and/or less than satisfactory discharges each year. Every discharged soldier’s separation costs the government an estimated $58,000.
Despite this abundance of complaints and warranted enforcement, CFPB’s first Trump-appointed leader, Mick Mulvaney as Acting CFPB Director, turned an about face on our military families by halting its use of its supervisory powers to fulfill its mandate of MLA enforcement.
CFPB’s new Director Kathleen Kraninger made it clear that she supports the same policies and practices begun under her predecessor in a March 8 letter to Ranking Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Further in a recent Capitol Hill hearing, Director Kraninger went even further, advising, as reported by POLITICO, Director Kraninger went even further, claiming that Congress via legislation should provide CFPB with appropriate authority.
The officials signing the letter to Mulvaney represent states as far west as Alaska and Hawaii, to as far east as Massachusetts and New York, and southward to Mississippi and North Carolina. Together, these state officers understood and embraced that when it comes to consumer finance, predatory lenders make no partisan distinction.