Rohit Chopra is Washington’s best hope

For our April issue of the Prospect, we decided to do some classic magazine profiles. But we wanted to profile people you haven’t seen profiled before, those who, outside of the spotlight, are making progress for the public good in a difficult political environment.

The first person I thought of was Rohit Chopra, the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His tour through government—from student loan ombudsman for the CFPB, to a short stay at the Department of Education, to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission—has yielded a blueprint for how to get things done. Chopra is an expert in digging into statutes and finding authorities to improve people’s lives. He takes thankless jobs and makes something out of them. He uses the bully pulpit to articulate how markets should work, even if it offends putative allies. He chooses battlefields nobody has fought on for decades. And he listens to people on the ground to formulate policy that helps them.

Now at CFPB, Chopra doesn’t have to cajole the bureaucracy; he controls it. And he’s already making a lot happen, frustrating a financial industry that isn’t used to seeing a cop on the beat.