In a webinar hosted by Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) and The Horizon Project, leading labor and state officials laid out strategies to protect public pensions from federal attacks and deploy state pension power to grow a strong economy for retirees, workers, and the public.
In a letter sent to Congress today, more than 20 state and national groups raised alarms over two bills — the STABLE Act in the House and the GENIUS Act in the Senate — that attempt to create a new regulatory framework for so-called stablecoins.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee will host a forum today to investigate the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The crypto industry’s Republican allies have introduced retrograde legislation to normalize the crypto assets known as stablecoins. This comforting moniker for a particular class of crypto assets is largely a public relations ploy that obscures their inherent risks. They really should be called un-stablecoins. However, they are a critical component of the crypto industry’s digital casino. And the crypto industry expects a huge return on its $130 million electoral spending spree. As such, passing this legislation would anoint stablecoins with federal imprimatur, exposing more crypto investors and the entire economy to more risk and instability.
The Trump administration’s plan to shut down CFPB headquarters is the latest unlawful attack on a government agency that truly works for people. Following mass purges, forcing staff onto administrative leave, slashing funding, freezing regulatory activity, and halting enforcement actions, this step is a blatant attempt to irreversibly shutter the agency in utter defiance of the law, even as the Trump administration is losing court cases for its overreach.
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been largely shut down by Elon Musk’s team and Acting Director Russell Vought, pulled the plug on a lawsuit against an online lender, SoLo Funds, that the agency had alleged was deceiving borrowers and imposing deceptive fees on more than half a million borrowers.
President Donald Trump’s energy secretary and two of his major donors won a key victory last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to back off a rule requiring large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and any plans to reduce them.
This executive order is an unconstitutional power-grab that delegates supreme authority over congressionally-mandated, court-sanctioned statutes and regulatory safeguards to unelected, unnominated, unconfirmed bureaucrats.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) overdraft fee rule will discourage financial institutions from abusive and predatory overdraft practices, which often target servicemembers and military families. Banks charge overdraft fees for covering transactions that exceed account balances, but these charges can be illegally or unfairly applied and overdraft fee revenue has become a major profit center for some institutions.
The Trump White House unveiled a new executive order that illegally undermines the congressionally-mandated independence of federal agencies that have a statutory obligation to regulate impartially in order to protect the public. A fact sheet that accompanied the executive order singled out the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock markets, the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law and consumer protection statutes, and the Federal Election Commission, which oversees electoral ethics and political spending.