The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday slammed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as “unaccountable to the American people” and laid out sweeping reforms that hew closely to legal challenges brought by financial companies and to a U.S. House Republican plan to curb the power of the Obama-era agency.

The 215-page report was the first in a series the Treasury Department plans to publish in response to President Donald Trump's calls for a review of financial regulations that he has cited for restricting economic growth. The release of the report comes as the U.S. Senate prepares to consider a House bill that calls for softening the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reforms that followed the financial crisis.

Mirroring the House bill, dubbed the Financial Choice Act, the Treasury Department's report suggested restructuring the single-director CFPB—now led by Richard Cordray—and stripping the agency of its supervision authority, among other reforms.

What follows are several highlights from the report.

'Unaccountable structure.'

The report takes up companies' oft-made claims that the White House should have greater control over the CFPB director, and it endorsed a federal appeals court decision, from October, that struck down the current structure as unconstitutional. That panel decision, which has since been vacated as the full appeals court mulls the dispute, prescribed this fix: Empower the president to fire the CFPB's director at will. “As an alternative” to that approach, the Treasury Department suggested the bureau be transformed into an independent multimember commission.

“The CFPB was created to pursue an important mission, but its unaccountable structure and unduly broad regulatory powers have led to regulatory abuses and excesses,” the report said. “The CFPB's approach to enforcement and rulemaking has hindered consumer choice and access to credit, limited innovation, and imposed undue compliance burdens, particularly on small institutions.”

The Treasury report said “the CFPB's combination of an unaccountable structure and broad, unchecked regulatory power is unprecedented.”

Regulation-by-enforcement has to go.

From the Treasury report: “Rather than seeking to provide clear rules on which regulated parties can rely as they offer credit to consumers and pursue innovation, the CFPB has exercised its authorities in a manner aimed at maximizing its own discretion and power. This approach has created confusion among regulated parties concerning their legal obligations, leading to a retrenchment in the provision of consumer financial products and services and erosion of consumer choice.”