Raj Date will replace Elizabeth Warren in her role as Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as the Bureau officially opens its doors. Date's appointment will be effective August 1 as Warren leaves Washington to resume her position as Leo Gottlieb Professor at Harvard University's School of Law.
Despite strong and vocal public support President Barack Obama declined to name Warren to run the CFPB, an agency she almost single-handedly created, ostensibly because she could not get the required 60 votes to be confirmed by the Senate. Instead he has announced the nomination of Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the Bureau's first director.
Raj Date currently serves as Associate Director of Research, Markets, & Regulations at CFPB. He oversees several offices including Research, Regulations, Card Markets, Mortgage Markets, Credit Information Markets, Deposit Markets, and Specialty Finance Markets. Before joining CFPB, Date worked for more than a decade in the financial services industry, both at Capital One Financial, where he was a Senior Vice President, and later as a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank. He founded and served as Chairman, and Executive Director of the Cambridge Winter Center, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to fostering an informed discourse on U.S. financial institutions policy. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School.
It is unlikely that Cordray will have an easy time being confirmed by the Senate either. Republican members have announced they will oppose anyone the President nominates and House members have made several moves to defund the agency, formed as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. CFPB is intended to act as a watchdog for American consumers, ensure that consumers have the information needed to make sound financial decisions, and enforce laws against abusive and deceptive financial practices. Federal law prevents a presidential appointee from occupying an office for which he or she is nominated until the appointment is confirmed (the alternative being a recess appointment which the Senate moved to prevent in Warren's case by refusing to recess over the 4th of July holiday period). Thus it is likely that Date will be de facto head of the Bureau for a while.
In announcing the appointment of Date and the transition of the Bureau to full operation, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said, "Professor Warren has done an extraordinary job standing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her efforts to simplify mortgage and credit card disclosures, protect military families from abusive and deceptive financial practices, and bring aboard top talent like Richard Cordray and Raj Date have built a strong foundation for the Bureau's future success."
