Panel vote on CFPB nominee delayed as Senate plans recess

WASHINGTON — The Senate Banking Committee is postponing its vote on Kathy Kraninger’s nomination to be the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the Senate moved to adjourn for a short recess on Wednesday.

The committee had scheduled a vote Thursday on Kraninger to lead the CFPB, Michael Bright to lead Ginnie Mae and four other nominations. But that looked less likely as word spread through the Capitol that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was planning to end Senate business Wednesday before a short break.

"We expect to finish today," a spokesman for McConnell's office said in an email. The Senate will return Aug. 13, the spokesman said.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Senate Banking Committee confirmed late Wednesday that the vote would be delayed. A new time has not yet been set.

The delay comes as Kraninger, a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget, has been heavily criticized by Democrats on the panel over her ties to the Trump administration's family-separation policy at the southern U.S. border. To lawmakers' frustration, she avoided direct answers to many of their questions at her July 19 nomination hearing.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, had initially scheduled the committee vote even though Kraninger had not yet submitted responses to "questions for the record" from Senate Democrats about her views on financial regulation and immigration.

Earlier Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called on Crapo to postpone the panel’s vote on Kraninger’s nomination until the administration provided documents on the nominee’s involvement with the policy that led to thousands of children being separated from their parents at the southern border.

“Ms. Kraninger and the Trump administration have offered no credible legal or factual basis for withholding this information, yet you are accepting their position and pressing forward with a rushed vote on Ms. Kraninger's nomination,” Warren said in a letter to Crapo. “I am deeply concerned by your willingness to accept their untenable position and by your refusal to work with your Committee members — as you have in the past — to resolve their good-faith concerns.”

The postponement also delays votes on Kimberly A. Reed to be president of the Export-Import Bank, Elad L. Roisman to be a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Rae Oliver to be the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Dino Falaschetti to be the director of the Treasury's Office of Financial Research.