The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau risk leaving Americans’ nearly $18 trillion in consumer debt with less supervision or regulation.
One CFPB staffer said Monday that every meeting and work item on their calendar, including reviewing investigative actions, had been deleted.
“I think at some point, the machinery is going to start to jam up,” said the employee, who asked to speak anonymously out of fear of reprisal. “What is industry going to do on its own?”
As of Monday evening, the CFPB’s homepage said “404: Page not found,” though other parts of the site appeared to be working.
The confusion comes after a turbulent weekend at the CFPB, whose acting director, Russell Vought, told employees late Saturday to stop most work activities and on Sunday not to report to the office for the rest of this week. He also said in a post on X that the agency “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.”
Meanwhile, staffers at the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency project have sought access to CFPB personnel information, part of efforts driven by the world’s richest person to remake or eliminate entire federal agencies from the Education Department to the nation’s main foreign aid body.
Both moves targeting the CFPB have already drawn lawsuits from a federal union.
The CFPB has been a target of GOP and Wall Street critics since its inception in 2011. That includes Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term that calls for abolishing the bureau altogether. The independent agency, a brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was set up by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Last year it survived a business-backed challenge to its funding that wound up before the Supreme Court.
In his first term, Trump installed Mick Mulvaney as the agency’s director, who had previously called the CFPB a “joke” and stripped the agency’s ability to pursue discrimination cases. He also dropped a lawsuit against payday lenders and fired the agency’s 25-member consumer advisory board.
The bureau is again under fire from Trump officials after an aggressive four-year run during the Biden administration, by the conclusion of which the CFPB estimated it had clawed back nearly $20 billion in consumer relief.
Congress granted the CFPB the power to supervise banks with more than $10 billion in assets and to regulate lending by nonbank entities, including mortgage, auto, payday and private student loan issuers. In addition to writing and enforcing rules for making consumer financial products fair and efficient, the agency also solicits, tracks and publishes consumer complaints.
One of the agency’s biggest recent wins over industry players has been limiting overdraft or insufficient funds fees. After years of CFPB scrutiny of these surcharges, many banks started dropping the fees on their own. In fact, the revenue banks derived from overdraft fees dropped more than $6 billion between 2019 and 2023. That agency push culminated in a final rule in December that would have capped overdraft fees at large banks to $5, but its fate is now uncertain.
Consumer advocates told NBC News shortly after the election that the popularity of the CFPB’s overdraft crackdown might lead Trump officials to leave those protections in place. But last week, the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee presented a draft resolution to overturn the bureau’s overdraft rule.
The CFPB issued a separate rule last March that appears to be all but defeated. That move slashed the typical credit card late fee from $32 to $8, drawing swift legal pushback from card issuers. A federal judge in Texas recently rejected the CFPB’s request to lift an injunction barring the rule, and it’s unlikely that the agency will submit further appeals under Vought’s leadership.
“I wonder if the new approach is just, ‘We’re not going to even bother to formally change the effective [rule] dates,’” the CFPB staffer said. “We’ll just not do anything, and we expect the industry to also know that we’re not going to do anything.”
Some relief for cardholders could come legislatively, though that path is steeper and narrower than the CFPB’s typical rulemaking process.
Earlier this month, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, echoing one of Trump’s campaign promises. However, the measure is expected to meet fierce opposition in Congress and from the financial industry. Lindsey Johnson, president and CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association, said in a statement that the effort reflected “Socialist-type pricing policies” that are “the best way to drive up costs for consumers.”
The agency has made other strides in protecting borrowers’ credit health, including surfacing violations made by student loan services and uncovering errors in medical debt reporting.
In 2023 — following a CFPB report on medical debt complications — the three major reporting bureaus announced they were wiping medical collections under $500 from consumers’ credit reports, causing an estimated 22.8 million people to see at least one medical bill dropped from their files. Last month, the agency finalized a rule that would remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of around 15 million consumers.
Consumer advocates have pointed out that the medical debt rule, like the rule capping credit card fees, is vulnerable to being overturned by Congress.
Under the Biden administration, the CFPB had also been positioning itself as a watchdog of Big Tech and artificial intelligence, as the industries crept deeper into consumers’ wallets. It created guardrails around “buy now, pay later” installment loans and increased its scrutiny of tech companies that have expanded into digital payments.
Musk himself, who called to “Delete CFPB” following Trump’s win, has participated in the latter trend. In January, his social media platform X announced a deal with Visa, the largest U.S. credit card network, allowing X users to move money between bank accounts and make peer-to-peer payments.
