WASHINGTON — House Republicans said Wednesday that a new government agency designed to protect consumers from problems with mortgages, credit cards and other lenders has too much power. They also criticized it for participating in a federal-state effort to force mortgage servicers to change the way they foreclose on troubled homeowners.
Testifying to Congress, the White House official assembling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made no apologies. Elizabeth Warren said the agency, created last year by the Frank-Dodd financial overhaul law, was badly needed and might have helped the country avoid its recent housing problems, including abuses in the ways foreclosures have been processed.
“If there had been a consumer agency in place, the problems in mortgage servicing would have been exposed early and fixed while they were still small, long before they became a national scandal,” she said.
