Attacks on the CFPB highlight DOGE’s pretense – CREW

DOGE’s purported motive to maximize governmental efficiency does not appear genuine in the case of the CFPB, because it is hard to deny the value to American consumers of the CFPB and its work. Anyone actually interested in government efficiency would champion and protect this agency, not impede or shutter it. Although many of DOGE’s actions across the government appear harmful, ill-reasoned and legally and ethically questionable, the consequences with respect to CFPB are particularly troubling.

Even industry groups subject to the CFPB’s regulation have conceded the benefits of the CFPB to the financial sector. For example, a representative of the Credit Union trade association recently spoke out about the lack of certainty that will be injected into the regulatory arena without the CFPB. And the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors explained in a 2023 court filing that “[l]enders, servicers, and consumers have operated by the CFPB’s guideposts for more than ten years, and without those rules substantial uncertainty would arise as to how to undertake mortgage transactions in accordance with federal law.”

Efforts to challenge the CFPB’s existence are not unfamiliar to the bureau’s nearly 2,000 dedicated federal employees who work to enforce the law, including last year’s serious challenge to its existence when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the agency after hearing a case challenging whether the agency’s funding structure was constitutional. But despite these threats to its existence, the CFPB has asserted its authority to regulate many lucrative business activities, including regulating financial entities and activities that may have previously been able to escape scrutiny, such as nonbank financial entities like payday lenders. The CFPB has taken action on fees associated with the more than $1.2 trillion in credit card debt Americans owe. And the CFPB has done work to stop data brokers from selling Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information.

The CFPB and its employees have worked to make sure that financial markets are “fair, transparent, and competitive”, prevent discrimination in the consumer financial services marketplace, prevent illegal fees, ensure that Americans aren’t subjected to predatory financial business practices, and that consumers have a place to go when they have a complaint about a financial institution that they need help resolving. Since the agency was formed, it has sent more than 6.8 million consumer complaints to companies for response, and 63 million consumers have gone to the CFPB for help answering financial questions. Until recently, I served as an attorney at the CFPB, proudly working shoulder to shoulder with many of the nonpartisan civil servants whose jobs are now threatened by the Trump administration and DOGE, and I have seen firsthand their commitment to protecting American consumers.

If the administration were actually interested in taking on waste, fraud and abuse, they would be building up the CFPB, the government agency tasked with rooting it out in the financial sector for the sake of consumers, rather than tearing it down. Otherwise, it seems the administration’s efforts to dismantle the CFPB are little more than an attempt to help wealthy corporate interests line their pockets and escape much needed government regulation.