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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is taking it easy on payday lenders accused of preying on low-income workers.

In the agency’s first report to Congress since Mick Mulvaney took the helm in November, the CFPB said it is dropping sanctions against NDG Financial Corp, a group of 21 businesses that the agency, under President Obama, had accused of running “a cross-border online payday lending scheme” in Canada and the United States.

“The scheme primarily involved making loans to U.S. consumers in violation of state usury laws and then using unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices to collect on the loans and profit from the revenues,” the CFPB lawyers argued in the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York in 2015.

The CFPB’s lawsuit had been winding its way through the courts until Mulvaney took over the bureau. One of the lead attorneys defending the payday lenders was Steven Engel, who is now assistant attorney general at the US Justice Department, and who was listed as […]