Chris D’Angelo, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s associate director of supervision, enforcement and fair lending, said Wednesday that he is leaving the bureau after eight years to work for New York Attorney General Letitia James.
D’Angelo said in an email to staff that he had accepted an offer to become the chief deputy attorney general for financial justice in New York. He is the most high-profile example yet of a top CFPB official decamping to a state with an aggressive consumer protection agenda.
D’Angelo spent three years in the
“He’s not going far — as all of you know, the Office of the Attorney General in New York has been a strong partner over the years given this office’s purview and interests as well as its proximity to our New York regional office,” Kraninger wrote.
D’Angelo previously had been former CFPB Director Richard Cordray’s chief of staff for three years. He joined the CFPB as an enforcement attorney in 2011, when the CFPB was created. Before that he served two years in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, and worked in private practice at Williams & Connelly and at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Cordray was closely tied to the network of state attorneys general and D’Angelo could prove effective if New York uses its leverage to team up with other states against wrongdoers. A handful of states, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, announced plans last year to create so-called mini CFPBs to focus on consumer issues as the CFPB transitioned to Republican control.
Last year Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro tapped Nicholas Smyth, a former CFPB enforcement attorney, to lead a newly created consumer finance unit to field consumer complaints and target predatory lenders.
The CFPB has not officially named a replacement, though Kraninger said in her email that staff can rely on David Bleicken, the deputy associate director of supervision, enforcement and fair lending, and Eric Blankenstein, the division’s policy associate director. Blankenstein, a political appointee, was paired with D'Angelo as part of an effort by former acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney to embed political staffers with senior career officials at the agency.
