‘We run the risk of another Great Recession’: People should be outraged by Trump’s efforts to kill CFPB

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

Employees at the CFPB, an agency designed to protect consumers from unfair financial practices, were ordered to stop all activities in recent days by new acting director Russell Vought, who is also serving as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position he was confirmed to by the Senate along party lines last week.

Vought reportedly closed the CFPB’s headquarters and told employees to stop working, according to the Wall Street Journal, as the administration ramps up efforts to shut it down—or at least declaw it to some degree.

The CFPB, which Congress created in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession, has long been a political target of Republicans, and with full control of the federal government, the Trump administration is evidently going after it in an attempt to deregulate the financial system.

While Trump himself can’t unilaterally get rid of the CFPB—only Congress can do that, as Congress was the body that created it—it’s unclear what happens next. Experts say that while the CFPB’s work is on pause, the rules and regulations that the CFPB has put into place are still on the books.

“It’s not vanishing into thin air,” says Kimberly Monty Holzel, a partner at Goodwin’s financial services, consumer financial services, and fintech practices, who previously worked at the CFPB for four years. “We have orders with active orders from the CFPB,” she says. “Those orders don’t terminate.”

She adds that the firms regulated by the CFPB—which include banks, debt collectors, financial payment platforms, and more—still need to “act in good faith cooperation with the government,” and that though what’s happening may be surprising or alarming, consumers should remember that there are still numerous other regulating bodies that are still active.

“The CFPB is not the only regulator—consumers can still go to the FDIC, the OCC, the Fed,” she says. “And states still regulate banks, too. There isn’t a vacuum of regulation.”

However, the Trump team has reportedly floated the idea of dismantling some other regulators, like the FDIC, too.

Mixed signals

Other experts say that what’s happening at the CFPB is a prime example of the mixed signals coming out of the Trump administration.

“They told people to go home and not work at the office. At the same time, they’re saying to other government employees ‘no more remote work,’” says Jeff Sovern, a Michael Millemann professor of consumer law at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law. “They have said that they’re trying to eliminate waste, so they’re gutting an agency that generates huge returns to consumers, $21 billion annually, and yet costs less than $1 billion per year to operate.”

“It’ll generate more waste,” he adds.

So what exactly is the administration doing then? “The whole thing makes no sense unless you see it as an attempt to eliminate or curtail agencies that they don’t like,” Sovern says.

As noted, many Republicans have long been miffed about the CFPB, which has, over the years, done things like cut overdraft fees, change mortgage lending rules, compensate fraud victims, establish a database for consumer complaints, and much more, typically to the benefit of consumers. The agency polls very strongly across both parties, with support from three-quarters of Republicans in recent years.

Even so, many Republican lawmakers have made it a target, “even though it’s been wonderful for their constituents,” says Sovern.

Sovern also has a warning for voters: The CFPB was born out of a financial crisis, and if it’s stymied, the consequences could be dire. “The bureau was created in 2010 because we had the Great Recession, and one of the things that led to the Great Recession was predatory lending,” he says. “Congress recognized that we needed an agency to protect consumers,” he says, because the agencies tasked with doing so weren’t getting the job done.

“If we get rid of the CFPB, we run the risk of another Great Recession.”

‘Less safe from financial traps and scams’

While a sequel to the Great Recession may not occur immediately, one thing is clear in the short term: Putting the CFPB’s work on pause does mean that consumers are in a more perilous position than they were before.

“Across the country, people in my family and your family are less safe from financial traps, scams, and mistakes than they were a few weeks ago,” says Chris Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah. The CFPB’s work is “the way that we ensure that companies are complying with the law,” he says, “and the people who do that job are now cooling their heels instead of protecting the public.”

Peterson echoes Sovern in that he thinks the public should be more outraged by what’s happening, particularly because the CFPB was created as an act of law—and taxpayers have paid for it to do its work.

“It’s a government service that we all paid for, and that is required by federal law to be provided to us all. And now that’s been suspended without a law that authorizes it. It’s not consistent with the constitution,” he says.

“We don’t have an experience quite like this in the history of the country,” Peterson adds. “It’s ambiguous as to what happens next.”

Holzel says that she thinks the CFPB will resume some activities at some point, and that what’s currently happening may be a sort of payback by the Trump administration on behalf of players in the financial industry who felt that the Biden administration’s CFPB had gone too far, and acted too aggressively in recent years.

“The past four years had very aggressive leadership, and very liberal views on their authority to touch certain areas, which are disputed,” she says. “People are not happy about the past four years because they felt like it may have been good for consumers, but chaotic for banks—banks that were trying to follow the rules in good faith.”

As for whether those in the industry are happy with what’s happening?

“I’m hearing different things as to whether or not it’s a good thing,” Holzel says.