FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 9, 2025
CONTACT: Carter Dougherty, carter@ourfinancialsecurity.org
Republicans Betray the People, Side with Big Banks, Big Tech, and Elon Musk
House votes to roll back junk fee caps and abandon payment app oversight
Washington, D.C. — The House majority today chose to give Wall Street banks free reign to charge outrageous overdraft junk fees and to abandon oversight of payment apps run by Big Tech and Elon Musk. Along partisan lines, the House voted to roll back two popular safeguards created by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), part of the broader Republican attempt to dismantle the CFPB, slash its funding, and eliminate critical consumer safeguards that protect everyday people.
The CFPB plan would have slashed overdraft charges from an average of $35 to $5, which would have saved people $5 billion each year, or $225 per household. Its plan for payment apps would have created protections against financial fraud and privacy violations on apps such as Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, Apple Wallet, Google Pay, and would have eventually applied to Elon Musk’s newly launched X-Money app.
“Today, House Republicans confirmed their allegiance to Wall Street Banks and Big Tech and turned their backs on the everyday people who need the CFPB’s common-sense protections,” said Christine Chen Zinner, consumer policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform. “Their votes made no sense except as a payoff to big banks and Big Tech billionaires that want to get richer by ripping the rest of us off.”
The final vote on the CRA resolution to overturn the overdraft rule was 217-211 (including one Republican voting no) and the final vote on the CRA resolution to overturn the Big Tech payment app oversight rule was 219-211. These measures were already passed by the Senate, allowing Trump to sign them into law.
Hundreds of community, consumer, labor, civil rights, and other organizations sent letters opposing the efforts to repeal the overdraft rule (nearly 300 groups) and payment app rule (nearly 200 groups) ahead of the votes urging House members to oppose rolling back the CFPB protections. The CFPB and particularly these two measures are very popular, with broad bipartisan support among voters.
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