When Bianca Jones, a 33-year-old special education teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, decided a couple of years ago that she wanted to buy a house, she started digging into her Experian credit report. She was shocked by what she found.
Her student debt had been double-counted, making it look as though she owed a quarter of a million dollars and putting home ownership out of reach. Jones disputed the items with Experian, one of the major credit reporting agencies, multiple times in writing and over the phone, but got nowhere.
“They kept saying it’s been verified, it’s been verified…They never investigated. They never tried to remove it,” Jones said in an interview.
Eventually, Jones complained to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog created by Congress in 2010 to protect consumers in their financial dealings, helping her lawyers show a judge the lengths she’d gone to mitigate damage to her credit, according to her attorneys, legal papers and a copy of the complaint. That paper trail eventually helped Jones successfully sue Experian to correct her record.
Jones closed on a house purchase in the Memphis suburb of Millington for $300,000 in January.
“If I didn’t have this agency to go to, I don’t think I’d be in the house right now,” said Jones. “It actually changed my life.”
Experian and the CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on Jones’ case.
Agency Facing Shutdown
In interviews, consumers who had fallen on hard times or known difficulty, lawyers who work with the poor and credit counselors told Reuters the CFPB had been a lifeline for people facing hardship and they feared that, without it, many consumers would be left unprotected from financial predators.
Conceived by Senator Elizabeth Warren to police the type of lending that fueled the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has long been a target of conservatives and industry. Congress created the agency as part of post-crash reforms in 2010 as the sole federal body primarily charged with protecting consumers’ rights in the financial marketplace.
The CFPB now faces extinction under President Donald Trump’s second administration, which says the agency is a political weapon for Democrats and a burden on free enterprise.
Speaking to reporters at the White House in February, Trump said it was “very important to get rid of the agency,” claiming, without spelling out evidence, that Warren had “used that as her little personal agency to go around and destroy people.”
In an interview, Warren dismissed the criticism as a sign the CFPB was doing its job. “This is not about vendettas. This is about enforcing the law as it is written, so that billionaires and billionaire corporations don’t cheat American families. I think that’s a pretty good thing,” she said.
White House Budget Director Russell Vought, a staunch CFPB critic and the agency’s acting head, told “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast in October he plans to shutter the CFPB. The administration is fighting in court to fire up to 90% of its workers, while planning to move pending investigations and litigation to the Justice Department.
The agency says it is due to run out of money in early 2026 and Vought says he cannot legally seek more until the Federal Reserve returns to what the administration deems “profitability,” a position experts dispute. Congressional Republicans also slashed the CFPB’s maximum allowable funding in July.
Together, the administration, congressional Republicans and industry-backed lawsuits have undone a decade’s worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending.
The agency has also dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations.