The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a longtime target of the Republican Party that has undergone a significant shakeup in recent weeks, will continue operating, the Trump administration says.
After Trump replaced its director with Russell Vought — director of the White House budget office and an author of Project 2025 — work at the CFPB was frozen. There was widespread worry the agency would be shut down, and the agency's union sued the Trump administration over what it said were plans to dismantle the CFPB, according to Politico.
In a motion filed on Monday, Vought asserted that the CFPB will stay, albeit in a different form, Politico reported.
“The predicate to running a ‘more streamlined and efficient bureau’ is that there will continue to be a CFPB,” Vought said in the court filing.
Republicans have opposed the CFPB since its creation in the Great Recession, when lawmakers added new levels of oversight on financial institutions and strengthened protections for banking industry whistleblowers.
In one of the agency's more notable cases, it fined banking giant Wells Fargo $100 million for the behavior of 5,300 employees who since 2011 had opened fake banking and credit card accounts and created online banking profiles in order to meet Wells Fargo's quotas.
One of the CFPB's rules last year capped credit card fees at $8, but a federal judge put it on hold after business lobbyists and banks protested the policy as unconstitutional. Under the Biden administration, the CFPB also moved to rein in credit card late fees and overdraft fees, along with "junk fees" hidden in hotel and event ticket bills.
Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk, who created the so-called Department of Government and Efficiency to slash federal spending, posted last year that he wanted to “delete the CFPB."
Vought, acting director of the agency, says he wants to end “the weaponization of ‘consumer protection.'"
He announced this month that the CFPB is dropping a lawsuit against the online lending platform Solo Funds, which the agency had accused of deceiving borrowers about the cost of loans.
“We are now seeing what it means for the Trump Administration to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — it is letting off scot-free a deceptive company that claimed 0% APR for payday loans of 400% APR or higher, with interest disguised in fake ‘tips’ and ‘donations’ that virtually everyone was forced to pay,” Lauren Saunders, associate director at the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center, said in a statement reported by CNN. “No state should tolerate a company flagrantly deceiving borrowers and ignoring state rate caps and licensing laws.”
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