On his first day in his side job as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s interim leader, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney spoke into a cluster of microphones to spread the word that, no, he would not be shutting down the agency.

“Rumors that I’m going to set the place on fire or blow it up or lock the doors are completely false,” Mulvaney said in November. (In February, addressing a gathering of state attorneys general in Washington, he questioned whether such a hostile move could even be successful, given the brutalist design of the CFPB’s headquarters.)