The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a US regulator set up by the Dodd-Frank Act 2010, is under attack in the courts for acting ultra vires.

RD Legal Funding, a hedge fund against which the regulator opened an investigation, is accusing it of misclassifying its activity as the issuance of loans. The company actually offers high-net-worth plaintiffs and others money in return for revenue that they might earn from judgments in future lawsuits.

The regulator is being sued in various courts at the moment, in many cases as a consequence of a ruling in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that quashed a $109 million penalty that it had levied on PHH Corp two years ago. In that case, the district court declared the regulator's structure unconstitutional, although it did say that it could continue functioning.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which faces the axe in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the recent presidential elections, originally sought to make the regulator independent of Congress and the presidency. According to Reuters, however, the court gave the US President the power to appoint a new director if he so chose.

The Washington Examiner has accused the agency of trying to construct an Orwellian database of account information from nearly a billion American credit cards, citing evidence from a recent Congressional hearing. It also cites evidence that this is being done without the permission of the data subjects.