Jeff Gelles: At your service: Consumer protection bureau hits the ground running

Here's a confession: Occasionally, I miss the Wild West days of consumer reporting, the ones before the new sheriff came to town.

In those lively old days, finding tricks and traps in a lender's fine print was like shooting fish in a barrel. Clever lawyers wrote terms that continually tripped up even sophisticated borrowers - like the "zero interest" teaser rates that suddenly vanished because a lender could point to a credit report showing a late payment on a totally unrelated bill.

More than once, they brought to mind that icon of the customer rip-off: the innkeeper in the musical version of Victor Hugo's classic Les Miserables, who boasted of charging guests for the lice, "extra for the mice," and "2 percent for looking in the mirror twice."

"Gotcha" terms haven't disappeared from the consumer marketplace and probably never will. Just ask cellphone customers who get socked with thousands of dollars in unexpected charges for "data roaming" overseas, or broadband subscribers whose service is suspended because they accidentally blew past a provider's monthly data cap.

But those finance-industry lawyers? Instead of crafting the latest version of the "universal default" or other terms finally outlawed as bait-and-switch-style deception, at least some are busy watching over the shoulder of the new sheriff: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a centerpiece of 2010's Dodd-Frank financial reform.

If you've been watching the political cross fire, you know the new agency hasn't had an easy ride into town, thanks to congressional Republicans who still strangely object to the idea of a little more marketplace law and order.

First, they scared President Obama away from naming Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the new agency she initially proposed. (A success they may live to regret, since Warren is running for the Senate from Massachusetts and proving to be a forceful voice in national debates, anyway.)

Then, GOP senators upped the ante: Led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, they demanded that Democrats agree to rewrite Dodd-Frank to weaken the new agency before they'd consider confirming anyone as its director - a maneuver they knew blocked the CFPB from fulfilling many of its new duties.

They enforced their demands with the filibuster and "pro forma" Senate sessions designed to stop the president from making recess appointments. Early this month, Obama trumped their tactics with a bold and controversial move of his own: Declaring that the Senate's holiday vacation from Washington was, in fact, a recess, he named his long-delayed appointee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, to head the CFPB.

That fight could have long repercussions, as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) made clear last week in a floor speech labeling the appointment "blatantly unconstitutional." At least one GOP senator plans to boycott Cordray on Tuesday, when he's scheduled to testify before a Senate committee.

Although handicapping political battles is above my pay grade, I'm always surprised at GOP willingness to openly block basic rules and enforcement - a perspective shared by Travis Plunkett of the Consumer Federation of America.

"On the one hand, they say, 'Oh, we support consumer protection.' On the other, they've done everything except throw their bodies in front of the agency's headquarters to stop it," he says. "These members of Congress have lined up with Wall Street banks and others in the finance industry who never wanted consumers to have a full-time cop on the beat to watch over them."

Now that the CFPB is fully up and running, it's a good time to review what the new sheriff has done in six months. Some highlights:

"Know Before You Owe." Transparency isn't all that consumers need to protect them from tricks and traps, but it's a start. So out of the gate, it's been a priority for the CFPB through a "Know Before You Owe" campaign that aims to make key financial deals - starting with mortgages, student loans, and credit cards - easier to understand, so consumers can shop for the best terms and avoid getting burned.

Through multiple rounds of testing, it has heard from more than 25,000 consumers, lenders, and others about proposed improvements to key mortgage-disclosure forms.

And last month, it offered a prototype of a simplified, two-page credit card agreement that highlights all the key terms, such as penalty interest rates, late-payment fees, and foreign-exchange fees. The prototype is being tested by the Pentagon Federal Credit Union, one of the nation's largest.

It won't be mandatory, but why would consumers willingly choose anything more confusing?

Consumer complaints. Remember what a great step forward 911 was? Young readers may find this a hoot, but once upon a time we had to keep the local fire department's number taped to our phones and hope we could read it through the smoke in an actual emergency.

One of the simplest advances delivered by the CFPB is having a single agency to contact if something goes wrong with a financial product. It already takes complaints about mortgage and credit card problems, forwards your complaint to the lender, and enables you to track its progress. Later this year, it hopes to do the same with complaints about credit reporting, debt collection, and other services.

Armed-service protections. With other agencies, the CFPB is building a database to combat financial frauds aimed at service members, veterans, and their families, and it has created a new Office of Servicemember Affairs. The goal of both efforts is protecting a community that faces special challenges and has other, more important things to worry about.

For many of the same reasons and with similar goals, the agency has also launched an Office of Financial Protection for Older Americans, and has named an ombudsman to help resolve problems with private student loans.

Examinations. Supervision is a key role for every financial regulator, with the goal of identifying problems and systemic risks before they get out of hand. The CFPB has begun examining consumer practices at the nation's largest banks and mortgage servicers, and will eventually do the same at nonbank financial players, such as payday and education lenders.

The new agency has issued only one substantive rule so far - to protect those, such as immigrants, who have to transfer money overseas. If consumer advocates have their way, it will soon address complaints about checking-account practices, such as the accounting manipulations banks use to boost overdraft fees, and about what Plunkett calls "the Wild West prepaid card market."

Oh, for those good old lawless days. Huh, Senate Republicans?