Trump’s CFPB Litigation Capitulation Amounts to Pardoning Corporate Wrongdoers Seven dropped cases would have helped people who were ripped off in financial transactions By Christine Chen Zinner Last week, the day the nominee for the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was testifying
As Christine Chen Zinner, a senior policy counsel at the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform, pointed out in an interview, the agency has been politically under siege since its creation. “We have a bad feeling about the direction that it’s going,” she said. “This is an agency that was created after a devastating financial crisis because there were regulatory gaps.”
At the behest of the new Trump-appointed leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has abandoned an enforcement case against megabank Capital One, a step that will cost consumers $2 billion in restitution.
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 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.
Chants of “let us work!” rang out across the courtyard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) blocks away from the White House on Monday, as hundreds of angry protesters rallied against the Trump administration’s decision to suspend all operations at the US’s top financial watchdog – an agency that has clawed back more than $21bn from Wall Street for defrauded consumers.
Elon Musk has spent years laying the groundwork to transform X into a digital payments platform. Now he appears to be helping dismantle the agency that would oversee it.
The new staff purges at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will allow Wall Street, predatory lenders, and many other financial companies to rip off their own customers without any recourse to an agency that has won $21 billion in relief for consumers in its 14-year history.
The only federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers and going after financial fraud by big banks, credit bureaus, and shady lenders, has been all but shut down, creating a new challenge for consumers who want to manage their finances well but now lack the services of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.