The day before Linda Wetzel closes his retirement home in Southport, North Carolina in 2012 – a cozy place where she can open her windows and get some ocean breeze at night – a bank that makes loans, she predicts I surprised her with the unprecedented fee. Wetzel washed away her mortgage documents and was unable to find the fees disclosed anywhere.
Wetzel made the payment and filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bank immediately began its investigation and a month later sent a check for $5,600.
“My first thought was ‘Thank you.’ I was crying,” she recalled. “That money was a year or two on my mortgage. It was my little nest egg.”
Wetzel’s refund is a small part of the work the bureau has done since it was created in 2011. It has reclaimed $21 billion for consumers. It reduced overdraft fees, reformed the market for student loan services, changed mortgage lending rules, and forced banks and remittances to compensate victims of fraud.
It may no longer be able to perform the task.
President Trump appointed Russell Vought on Friday. Russell Vert confirmed a day ago that he was heading the Administration as the agency’s acting director. Vought was the author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint to defeat the federal government, who called for major changes, including the abolition of the Consumer Affairs Bureau.
Less than 36 hours later, Vought threw the agency into confusion. On Saturday, he ordered the department’s 1,700 employees to stop almost all of their jobs and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funds. Then, on Sunday, he closed the headquarters of the station next week. The employee said the workers turned away when they tried to retrieve the laptop from the office.
The bureau is “a weaponized institution that has long awakened industry and individuals,” Vert wrote in X on Sunday.
Created by Congress in the aftermath of the housing crisis that caused the Great Recession, the Consumer Bureau is one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators by issuing mortgages, credit cards, and around, and punishing businesses. It’s now one. Student loans, credit reporting and other areas that impact the financial lives of millions of Americans.
The bureau’s actions became lightning for criticism from banks and Republican lawmakers, putting it straight into the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The agency’s enemy has long sought its elimination, but only Congress has the power to do. Elon Musk, the billionaire leader of the government efficiency team that has created chaos across the federal government, posted “CFPB RIP” on social media platform X on Friday. A few hours ago, his peers had access to the Consumer Bureau’s headquarters and computer systems.
During the first Trump administration when Republicans ruled both chambers, lawmakers were unable to gather enough votes to abolish the institution. Some people show that they want to try again. Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican who works for the Senate Banking Committee, called the station a “fraudulent agency” on Sunday on the CBS news program “Face the Nation.”
“It was basically a reckless institution that was allowed to go beyond any mission that was supposed to be originally intended,” Hagerty said. “It’s time to hold it down.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, has fought to create an agency, describing herself as the “mama” of X-biography, spending her last decade trying to dismantle the Consumer Bureau. Ta.
“President Trump has campaigned to support working families, but Las Vaut said it’s open season to scam families on Wall Street,” she said in a written statement Sunday. “What Vought is doing is illegal and dangerous, and we’re going to fight back.”
Many of the institutional actions have a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks. The rules reviewed the mortgage market and curbed the types of subprime mortgages that caused the housing crisis. Pressure from the bureau has led large banks to reduce or eliminate overdraft fees, and recently finalized rules have made most of these fees $5.
The agency recently adopted rules to remove medical debt from its credit reports and limit the deferred fees for most credit cards to less than $8 a month, but lawsuits delay those rules from becoming effective. I did.
“It’s impressive to me that people’s economic dissatisfaction has created the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and people’s economic dissatisfaction has created the Trump,” said Shayak Sarkar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Masu.
Trump’s team prioritizes attacks on certain institutions, such as the U.S. International Development Agency and Consumer Affairs Bureau, which serve vulnerable groups, Sarkar said he had said, “Many of the following issues have been added to agents like Immigration Customs.” The enforcement has stepped up the crackdown on immigrants, throwing “federal support and support.”
The bureau cannot be closed without Congressional action, but its director has the power to fundamentally change its approach. During Trump’s first term he appointed Mick Mulbany – after which Vert, director of the Budget Office, now led as the agency director. Mulvaney called the agency a “joking” in a “sick and sad way,” and sharply cut back on its enforcement action and rulemaking work.
The agency’s power swayed like a pendulum. It moved aggressively when Democrats held the White House but were pulled back during Trump’s first term. Mulvaney and his Trump-appointed successor, Kathleen Kraninger, have made the Bureau a form of hibernation, wiped out much of the payday lending market and thwarted rules that cut the Bureau’s enforcement action.
But several current agency employees who spoke secretly for fear of retaliation said that Vought’s order on Saturday had grown beyond what happened in the last Trump administration.
His instructions to “stop all supervision and exam activities” sparked a specific alarm. Other federal agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve System and the Office of the Secretary of Currency, also oversee the bank, but the Consumer Bureau is the sole regulator of non-bank lenders. These companies make up a large portion of the $13 trillion mortgage market.
Vought also said he intends to cut off Consumer Bureau funds that come directly from the Federal Reserve, outside the usual Congressional budget process. The agency’s budget for fiscal year 2025 demanded about $800 million in annual spending, and the Fed passed $245 million to the bureau in January to meet its latest demand.
Vert wrote that he wrote to X, and that the bureau told the Fed that he would not have a next fundraising draw because it was “not reasonably necessary” to carry out its duties.
Adam Levitin, a Georgetown Law professor who specializes in financial regulations, said on Sunday that Vert’s orders could be illegal. Some of the federal laws controlling the Consumer Affairs Bureau have ordered that certain entities be overseen, and the work, he said, appears to be undiscretionary.
The proxy director “has the ability to seriously smash CFPB through slow bleeding, but is trying to skip every step that is needed and immediately take a death blow,” Levitin said. . “He may not have the legal ability to actually do that, but I don’t know how important it will be. Much of the way the Trump administration has dealt with regulatory bodies has been important factors. It’s a kind of blitz tactic because it creates fear, uncertainty and chaos.”
Saturday’s rally outside the headquarters of the department, hosted by Staff Union, attracted hundreds of attendees. Maryland residents asked to withhold their names for fear of retaliation from Trump’s allies and attended with her husband’s federal workers to help agency employees.
“I don’t think people understand what the CFPB does,” she said. “The administration said it was shutting down it because of fraud, but said the literal job of the bureau is to protect people from fraud and waste lenders.”
Wetzel, a retired employee who used a $5,600 refund to replace the floors of her new home, said her prompt action in response to her complaints made her feel empowered.
“Having the government told us what the banks did was wrong, it was very reassuring to save that this is not the rule of law,” she said.
