English has served in many capacities as a member of the U.S. federal government. Before joining the CFPB, she worked in both the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Treasury. She worked on the transition team that launched the new agency in 2010. She later served as Deputy Chief of Staff. She then returned to OMB, serving as senior advisor to the Deputy Director of Management. She returned to CFPB in 2015, serving as Deputy Chief Operating Officer and then Chief of Staff.
On November 24, 2017, English was appointed Deputy Director of the CFPB by outgoing Director Richard Cordray. Cordray resigned his position as Director effective midnight November 25, 2017, and sent a letter to CFPB staff announcing that English would serve as Acting Director. That same evening, President Donald Trump appointed the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, as the Acting Director of the CFPB. On November 26, 2017, English filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to block Mulvaney from taking leadership of the CFPB. English was represented in the lawsuit by appellate lawyer and former CFPB official Deepak Gupta. Two days later, 28 November 2017, a federal judge rejected English's emergency request to block President Trump's appointment of Mulvaney. A few weeks later, 10 January, a court ruled against English. English has received backing from a number of current and former Democrat legislators calling her the rightful Acting Director, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Sherrod Brown, Senator Richard Durbin, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and former Representative Barney Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank Act. A number of law professors also support her position, including Laurence Tribe, Martin Lederman, and Nina Mendelson. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows the president to appoint an interim replacement for an appointed officer of an executive agency without Senate confirmation, but the FVRA does not provide the "exclusive means" for filling a vacancy when "a statutory provision...designates an officer or employee to perform the functions and duties of a specified office temporarily in an acting capacity." The law establishing the CFPB is arguably unclear about whether the director's resignation qualifies as "unavailability" under FVRA, leading to confusion as to who would lead the agency and setting up a legal battle. The Office of Legal Counsel has consistently interpreted the FVRA as providing a non-exclusive option for appointing a successor when another, more specific option exists in another statute. The Office of Legal Counsel thus released an opinion that the FVRA gives the President the right to appoint an interim successor in this case. The top lawyer at the CFPB concurred with the Trump administration's opinion and directed all staff at the agency to disregard English's claims to be the Acting Director. She resigned from office on July 9, 2018, in light of President Trump's appointment of Kathleen Kraninger to serve as CFPB director full-time. She was succeeded by Brian Johnson, who was appointed to serve in an acting capacity.
