Remarks of Tom Feltner, Americans for Financial Reform
For over a decade, people have had a dedicated financial watchdog in their corner: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So, it is no surprise that the Trump Administration moved quickly to shut it down in the early days of last year. That’s why Americans for Financial Reform and a broad-based coalition of consumer protection, civil rights, labor, community, and faith-based organizations across the country have been fighting day in and day out to put the CFPB back to work protecting people and their finances.
Most of us don’t have a team of lawyers to fight financial firms when we get overcharged, get scammed, or face a rigged or broken debt collection process. The CFPB is our legal team. And since it opened its doors, that team has returned over $21 billion to millions of people. Untold billions more have been saved by the regulatory safeguards the CFPB has put in place. But hidden in those numbers are people whose stories should be steering the agenda rather than pushed to the sidelines.
This past year alone, over five million people turned to the CFPB with their financial problems–from foreclosure issues to credit reporting errors–often with no place else to go. Since taking office, this administration has made it harder to fix financial problems before they hurt the economy, harder to hold Wall Street and Silicon Valley accountable when they break the law, and, just recently, harder to even file a complaint.
CFPB has worked tirelessly to make banking fair and affordable
We are going to hear a lot about the very real need for affordability in the coming days, and we need to lift up the work of an agency that has worked for fair, affordable banking for over a decade.
This is an agency that tried to cut overdraft fees to $5, saving the average family $225 a year. This is an agency that tried to cut credit card late fees from $32 to $8 saving another $220 a year for more than 45 million people. And this is an agency that took predatory lenders and scammers to court when they broke the law and won.
We are calling on the courts to stand with people over billionaires
So today, the courts will take one more step in the process of deciding the future of the CFPB. We know they will hear the same tired arguments on why the CFPB cannot or should not take on the special interests that benefit when everything is more expensive and everyone is in debt. But we will also hear real stories from the people and workers on the front lines of a movement to make finance serve the public, not the other way around.
With our allies in Washington and across the country, we have laid out exactly what a strong CFPB should look like—an independent agency empowered to hold Wall Street and Silicon Valley to account, with independent leadership free from corporate and political influence.
The alternative is clear. With a shuttered CFPB, people will pay more and we will end up back where we started during the days of the foreclosure crisis–where the rules were written by the people who profited from breaking them and millions lost their homes and their livelihoods.
So we are proud to stand with NTEU and our allies to call on the CFPB leadership to listen to the people who turn to them every day for help, and to put CFPB workers back to work.