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 bea
en a target of conservatives and industry. Congress created the agency as part of post-crash reforms in 2010 as the sole feder
l 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, wit
hout 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 abou
t 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 th
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e 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 sa
ys he cannot legally seek more until the Federal Reserve returns to what the administration deems “profitability,” a position experts dis
pute. 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 ru
les 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.
The CFPB and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Warren said that as a law professor studying bankruptcy she saw that consumer protections were weak and fragment
ed, and that America needed a single federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive and abusive practices.
“I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one
or more of their creditors,” she told Reuters. “For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between f
ifth and tenth, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated.”