By Tom Feltner, Associate Director of Consumer Policy
The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are blocked in the courts, months after missing its promised deadline to completely shut down the agency. Now, the Trump CFPB is hard at work rewriting the agency’s history to be an industry apologist and rubber stamp rather than a consumer watchdog. This is more than a simple step in its ongoing deregulatory agenda. Rather, it is an effort to sever the CFPB’s direct connection to people’s economic experiences and hide the mounting hardship people are facing in Trump’s economy.
Created following the 2008 global financial crisis, Congress gave the CFPB the tools to address many of the problems that had gone long unaddressed. At the top of the list were predatory mortgage loans designed to fail, customer service doom loops that left people with no place to turn, and a debt-fueled collapse in household financial security. The CFPB and its staff worked to course correct the financial market and the economy not just through supervision and enforcement of consumer protection and anti-discrimination laws, but by building an agency that was transparent and responsive to the needs of the public.
The CFPB’s website, consumerfinance.gov, has been central to that work and serves as a vital repository where everyday people and businesses could learn their rights, access unvarnished information about financial services and products, get answers to their questions, and understand how the decisions of the CFPB’s leadership shaped the markets around them.
That is why the Trump CFPB has tried—and failed—to delete that history in a gambit to tell a different, pro-industry story about the CFPB.
Rewriting the history of a consumer watchdog as a deregulatory rubber stamp
The Trump administration has aggressively tried to erase or rewrite all kinds of history, from attempts to delete the Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force training materials to removing hundreds of federal datasets used to understand and track veterans, education, climate, and other issues. In one of the latest, but certainly not the last example of Trump’s revisionist history, early this summer, the institutional memory and the combined knowledge of 15 years of CFPB work nearly went dark.
What began as an ostensibly routine step to repair the damage done by DOGE staffers in their clumsy, middle-of-the-night attempt to entirely take down the CFPB’s website quickly shifted into a wholesale digital purge.
On May 14, CFPB officials scrubbed over 1,600 blog posts, deleting educational materials, research updates, and tips to avoid predatory loans and scams. Five days later, more than 2,000 press releases were purged, including public testimony and speeches from CFPB leaders from all three prior administrations. By early June, the agency had wiped 35 crucial, periodic reports detailing harmful practices it had uncovered inside banks and other lenders over the past 15 years.
This was not, as the CFPB would later claim, a routine website reorganization. It was deliberate sabotage.
We sprang into action, the CFPB backtracked, and what it means for responsive government
The Trump administration’s penchant for revisionist history being long understood, many of the missing documents were quickly located on the Wayback Machine or made available through the backup maintained by CFPB’s union, NTEU local 335. AFREF raised the alarm, and The Guardian covered the issue in an investigative report released just days after the CFPB’s initial actions. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Raphael Warnock, Andy Kim, and Lisa Blunt Rochester also called on the Trump CFPB to provide immediate answers about the mass deletion of public records.
Faced with mounting scrutiny and a series of oversight hearings in the House and Senate just a few weeks away—ones where tough questions about deleting public records were certain to be raised—the CFPB backtracked. On June 25, a little over a month after the purge began, the CFPB quietly launched a new, dedicated archive—restoring public, searchable access to the deleted files.
The restoration of these materials is an undeniable victory for transparency and responsive government, but the casual removal of the entire history of the CFPB was a warning shot that exposed a dangerous contempt for the agency and its mission. It is also just one example of the current CFPB leadership’s willingness to jump first and ask questions later.
CFPB’s continued effort to hide people’s struggle with junk fees, debt survival, and high prices
We are watching this play out again—this time with the CFPB’s consumer complaint database and its recently deleted repository of nearly four million complaint narratives. For the past fifteen years, people shared stories with the agency when they had no place else to take their problem with a foreclosure, medical debt, or credit card bill. Rather than cracking down on the abuse that led to the millions of financial problems and holding wrongdoers accountable, Trump’s CFPB leadership has made it clear yet again that they are far more willing to paper over problems than solve them. With scams skyrocketing, lenders handed a free pass to discriminate, and prices on a ceaselessly upward march, hiding the evidence of people’s financial challenges in Trump’s economy won’t make those problems go away. What is clear is that the Trump CFPB is charging ahead in the misguided effort to try to cover up corporate misdeeds anyway.