A Times editorial on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau states, "Other bank regulators, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are not subject to the appropriations process, as a shield against political interference."
Republicans want to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau subject to the congressional appropriations process; the Times and the Obama administration want to keep it insulated.
As an argument in favor of "a shield against political interference," the example of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency seems a strange one for the Times to bring up. Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote the other day that calling the OCC a regulator is "almost laughable." Instead, he described it as "a coddler, a protector, an outright enabler of the institutions it oversees."
Anyway, if shielding government agencies from "political interference" is such a good idea, why not eliminate Congress altogether, and turn the whole government over to a permanent bipartisan commission led by Kenneth Feinberg and Pete Peterson? Thing of all the money we could save on elections.
There are other words for "political interference." They include "democracy," and "constitutional checks and balances" and "accountability."
Imagine how the Times would react if a Republican president were in office and the Democrats controlled Congress and the Republican president wanted to establish some anti-abortion or pro-gun agency with funding "not subject to the appropriations process, as a shield against political interference." The Times, rightfully, would be apoplectic about an executive branch effort to evade the constitutional checks and balances.