Mark Paoletta seems not to like the Government Accountability Office’s tone.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s chief legal officer wrote the GAO last week, defending CFPB Acting Director Russ Vought’s Feb. 8 request that the bureau receive $0 from the Federal Reserve for the fiscal quarter between April and June.

The letter comes as a response to June correspondence from the GAO, in which the congressional watchdog “weaponiz[ed]” the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 “for political purposes,” according to Paoletta.

Senate Democrats had asked the GAO to investigate the CFPB in light of multiple attempts to fire the vast majority of the bureau’s workforce.

On Vought’s first full day in charge of the bureau, he wrote Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to decline any further “unappropriated” funds – and posted about it on social media.

“CFPB will not be taking its next draw ... because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties,” Vought wrote on X. “The Bureau's current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment. This spigot, long contributing to CFPB's unaccountability, is now being turned off.”

Paoletta last week accused the GAO of using the social post as its “sole predicate” – rather than Vought’s letter to Powell.

Neither the post nor the CFPB’s subsequent actions “could conceivably be construed as an illegal withholding of funds under the ICA,” Paoletta wrote. “Concluding otherwise would not only eviscerate the CFPB Director’s discretionary authority to determine the amounts needed during the fiscal year to carry out Bureau operations, but it would also create an artificial funding floor where only a statutory ceiling exists.”

The CFPB draws its funding from the Fed – a mechanism that spawned a closely watched legal case. The Supreme Court last year upheld the funding structure as constitutional. That helps Paoletta’s argument – yet the CFPB legal chief, in his letter to the GAO, branded the congressionally designed mechanism as “reckless and irresponsible.”

It’s essential to look at correspondence between the GAO and CFPB through the lens of time. The GAO’s June letter came two weeks after the city of Baltimore voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against the CFPB. Representatives of the bureau had made declarations in court that there is no mechanism to “transfer away money from, or otherwise relinquish control” over money in the CFPB’s reserve fund.

Between June and now, however, lawmakers passed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” capping the CFPB’s access to funding at 6.5% of the Fed’s operating budget – a decrease from 12%.

“Congress expressly affirmed the Acting Director’s determination that the Bureau’s funding level was ‘excessive’ when it reduced the cap on the Director’s discretionary request authority by nearly half,” Paoletta wrote to the GAO. “Your boss — Congress — has thus enshrined its agreement with the Acting Director’s efforts to right-size the Bureau into law.”

Paoletta copied House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, on last week’s letter, further asserting that the GAO’s argument that the CFPB is violating the ICA “undermine[s] both President [Donald] Trump and Congress.”

The GAO’s June letter is “not only in opposition to Acting Director Vought’s laudable attempts to implement President Trump’s historic reform efforts, but also in opposition to Congress’s attempt to scale down an out-of-control agency,” Paoletta wrote last week.

Paoletta noted that the CFPB’s funding does not expire at the end of a fiscal year. Rather, unused funds “remain available to CFPB for obligation in future fiscal years,” he wrote.

Vought “acted well within his legal authorities in declining to request further funds from the Federal Reserve System,” Paoletta wrote, noting that current law gives the CFPB acting director “sole discretion” to determine how much money the bureau needs to function.

“To read this unambiguous grant of discretion as a requirement that the Director request the full amount of funds available from the Federal Reserve is untenable and part of a politicized campaign against President Trump’s historic efforts to restore fiscal sanity and efficiency to the Federal Government,” Paoletta wrote. “The conclusion GAO apparently seeks — that the Acting Director’s decision to decline to draw down unneeded funds constituted an illegal impoundment under the ICA — is diametrically opposed to the purpose of the ICA itself.”