Plenty of potluck, Pabst and the wonder of it all
Employees had taped paper snowflakes to the windows and hung a strand of white Christmas lights from the ceiling. Soft music played from an iPod, and a plastic penguin greeted guests arriving from their cubicles two floors below. The potluck offerings stretched across several tables - homemade blackberry cobbler and pineapple upside-down cake, gingerbread cookies and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.</br></br>The gathering inside the seventh-floor conference room at 1801 L St. NW on Thursday night resembled many office parties this time of year in downtown Washington.</br></br>But it was the first holiday celebration for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in July when President Obama signed into law a far-reaching financial overhaul bill. The bureau will have broad powers to write rules aimed at preventing abuses in mortgages, credit cards and other consumer loans.</br></br>To some in the room, the gathering seemed a minor miracle. Over the past two years, as lawmakers wrestled with how to prevent a crisis like the one that crippled the economy in 2008, the bureau's existence often seemed in doubt. It had the Obama administration's support, but Republicans on Capitol Hill criticized the idea of a new agency as government overreach - another layer of bureaucracy that would increase costs on banks and small businesses and constrict access to credit for ordinary Americans. Financial industry lobbyists pushed hard to get clients exempted from the new regulator's reach.</br></br>In the end, legislation squeaked through Congress, the consumer protection bureau became reality and now its fledgling staff - some detailed from agencies such as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, some in their early 20s, some gray-haired veterans, almost all impeccably dressed - was sipping wine and commiserating about long hours spent assembling a federal bureau from scratch.