Here is what I am hoping is a rhetorical question: Should federal agencies have slush funds? By "slush fund," I mean a pot of money that the agency, department, bureau or program can use even if Congress doesn’t want it to.

I would hope that Democrats and Republicans alike would agree that that is a bad thing.

I thought it was back in 2017, when President Trump asked me to take over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I had heard that my predecessor, Richard Cordray had been squirrelling away money just in case Republicans figured out a way to use the power of the purse to rein in the renegade Bureau.

To understand how he did that takes a quick primer in the unique way that the CFPB is funded. It does not get money from Congress, but rather from essentially an allowance from the Federal Reserve. And while there is a cap on how much that can be each year, the cap is tied to the Fed’s earnings, not to how much money it takes to actually run the Bureau.

Critically, the allowance is set by the director of CFPB (the group getting the money), not by the Fed (the group providing the money). And so long as the allowance is below the cap, there’s not a thing the Fed or........

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