The Federalist Society has converted the teleforum on Noel Canning in which I participated last week into a podcast. With respect to CFPB one other option I didn’t fully contemplate at that time was that the now-“headless” agency might revert back to its initial status of the Secretary of Treasury providing oversight of the agency, as was the case before Cordray was illegally appointed. If this is the case, it seemingly would preserve CFPB’s jurisdiction over the entities initially transferred to the agency but not to the new entities (such as debt collectors, etc.), which transferred only upon the appointment of a confirmed Director (of course, there was some question even before this whether Cordray met the statutory definition of “confirmed Director”). There is also some question about how limited the Treasury Secretary’s powers would be in that case–my reading of the statute is that the Secretary of the Treasury’s powers were limited to taking ministerial actions to set-up the agency and its operations but could not issue substantive rulings. That interpretation also is consistent with how the Bureau actually acted during the interim period when Elizabeth Warren was setting up the agency from the White House and Secretary of Treasury.