Most people don’t have a team to fight back against financial firms when they get overcharged, get scammed, or face a rigged or broken debt collection process. That’s why, following the last financial crisis, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection as the only federal agency with the sole purpose of protecting people in the financial markets. In its 15-year history, the CFPB has taken on payday lenders, Wall Street banks, scammers, and big tech companies returning over $21 billion to millions of people who were harmed by faulty financial products and had no other place to turn. Untold billions more have been saved by the regulatory safeguards the CFPB has put in place.
The CFPB is under attack.
Since the first weeks of the current administration, the Trump-appointed CFPB leadership and Republicans in Congress have worked to carry out the Project 2025 goal of dismantling the Bureau. While these efforts have been blocked in court, the Trump-Vought CFPB has continued to chip away at the agency’s staff, roll back critical protections, drop enforcement cases and let scofflaws off the hook, slash its budget, and undermine the powers it was granted by Congress to stop financial abuse, prevent scams, and keep the country out of another financial crisis.
You can view an up-to-date, day-by-day summary of the attacks on the CFPB below.
Advocacy
Reports and Fact Sheets
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Press Release: Trump Dismantling CFPB but Voters Support the Agency
Since the first weeks of the Trump administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Acting Director Russell Vought has worked to carry out the Project 2025 goal of dismantling the Bureau, the only federal agency with the sole mission of protecting people in the financial markets.
AFR in the News
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Scotsman Guide: Poll shows broad support for CFPB ahead of Vought’s congressional testimony
“The CFPB was created in the wake of one of the worst financial crises in our nation’s history,” Feltner stated, referring to the establishment of the bureau in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act after the 2008 financial crisis.
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American Banker: In Ongoing Records Purge, CFPB Deletes Supervisory Reports
Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at AFR, said much of the content is no longer available or is inaccessible to the public, as well as to federal and state regulators. “Deleting this information wholesale is a step in the wrong direction,” said Feltner, who was a policy fellow and advisor at the CFPB…
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The Guardian: Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it
“This is a desire to delete the story of the CFPB up until now and to start telling a new story, that the CFPB is in the way of innovation and that the CFPB is hurting, rather than helping, consumers,” said Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform. He previously…
