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Former CPSC Chair Endorses Elizabeth Warren

By Deepak Gupta

There's been a ton of coverage lately speculating about whether Elizabeth Warren will get the CFPB nod, and arguing the case for or against.  Amid that chatter, a piece by former CPSC chair Ann Brown stands out as particularly compelling:

When I took the job of chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the 1990?s, I?d never administered a large staff. I?d never run an agency, a corporation or any large institution.

I had, however, been a children?s safety advocate and consumer specialist for years, and I?d been a close outside observer of the commission. I knew its inner workings like the back of my hand, and I anticipated issues we would address and knew how we should address them.

During my confirmation hearing, not a single senator asked me about my ?lack of administrative experience.? For that matter, I am sure that countless other agency heads and cabinet officials ? including ones still on the job ? also skirted those sorts of questions, even though they had similar backgrounds.

This has me thinking: Why is it that officials and pundits who don?t support Elizabeth Warren?s nomination as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have taken to questioning her qualifications?

Having run a large, highly visible consumer agency, I know first-hand that Warren has the right experience to succeed. She is likely to bring visibility to the agency as its first director ? the sort of visibility that can allow it to build public confidence, insulate itself from industry capture, recruit first-rate career staff and build momentum for meaningful reform.

* * *   You may have noticed that bank lobbyists don?t tend to question the experience ? administrative or otherwise ? when one of their colleagues gets a government job. Nobody says that former bank lobbyists ? like John Dugan, now head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ? lacked the necessary administrative experience.

The president is faced with an important decision in who to nominate as the first CFPB director. He ought to consider the real issues.

Brown's point about the importance of Warren's visibility and public credibility, and the way in which that could translate into getting the agency off on the right track, strikes me as the best argument I've seen for Warren's nomination.  You can read the full piece here.

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on July 30, 2010 (boomark / email).