Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

The Supreme Court Just Handed Another Loss to Congress

Legislators have delegated too much of their decision-making to powerful agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

May 16, 2024 at 5:15 PM UTC

By Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Gotta fund it.
Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

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We ought to be left a tad uneasy by Thursday’s 7-2 Supreme Court decision upholding the mechanism for funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The result isn’t wrong, and should even have been expected; but the implicit invitation to Congress to repeat the strange budgetary experiment ... well, that’s the worrisome part.

The CFPB was created in 2010 as part of Dodd-Frank, which granted the new agency broad authority over consumer finance, including enforcement of a new statute making it illegal for lenders “to engage in any unfair, deceptive, or abusive act or practice.” All quite sensible.