Unlawful Shut Down of Consumer Agency Endangers Working Families, Honest Businesses, the Economy

February 10, 2025 — Press Release

CFPB Is Essential To Protect Ordinary People from Unfair, Deceptive, and Abusive Financial Practices

WASHINGTON – Consumer advocates warned today that the illegal effort by the Trump Administration to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) endangers the entire economy, as well as critical work to protect families from financial ruin and honest businesses from unscrupulous competitors. In the last few days, Elon Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought stated he would request $0 in funding and directed that nearly all work stop, and unvetted DOGE employees gained access to CFPB data systems that contain highly sensitive consumer and business information, including Social Security numbers and other private data.

“The gravity of this attack on the CFPB cannot be overstated. Financial companies have shown time and time again that they cannot police themselves. The Administration is trying to shut down an agency created by Congress to fix problems that caused over eight million people to lose their jobs and almost four million families to lose their homes during the Great Recession,” said Rich Dubois, executive director of the National Consumer Law Center. “The CFPB saves homes, stops fraud that ruins lives, and enforces key laws, winning $21 billion in relief for over 200 million people harmed by credit bureaus, big banks, debt collectors and predatory lenders.”

“The illegal actions to shut down the CFPB halt work to safeguard your private information, protect you when hackers raid your bank account, and help you save your home when you are being unfairly rushed to foreclosure. The CFPB forced Wells Fargo to pay billions for creating 16 million fake accounts and required the credit bureaus to fix mistakes damaging millions of credit reports, but that type of work has now screeched to a halt,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center. “The CFPB now appears poised to roll over and play dead in pending lawsuits by big banks and credit bureaus, letting them overturn new rules returning $5 billion in excessive overdraft fees to struggling families and removing medical debt from credit reports.”

Pending work that is now halted includes:

• A lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo for allowing fraud to fester on the Zelle person-to-person payment service used by many banks, resulting in Americans losing hundreds of millions of dollars to fraud tied to the payment network’s shoddy safeguards.
• Charges against the bank that disburses payments for Social Security, veterans’ pensions, and disability benefits to 3.4 million holders of the Direct Express Card, including deliberately disconnecting 24 million customer service calls and mishandling fraud complaints.
• A pending rulemaking to stop data brokers from selling sensitive personal data to scammers, stalkers, and spies.
• A lawsuit against the credit bureau Experian for conducting sham investigations of credit report errors and failing to remove or reinserting errors on reports–violations of federal law that threaten consumers’ access to credit, employment, and housing. 
• A lawsuit against the biggest lender for people buying mobile homes, Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance, which set families up to fail by ignoring obvious red flags that they could not afford the loans and then piling on the penalties when people fell behind. 
• Oversight of the biggest banks to ensure that they comply with the law–work that predates the CFPB and ensures the safety of the banking system.

Some of the CFPB’s highlights in recent years include:

• Ordering Wells Fargo to pay $3.7 billion for widespread mismanagement of auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts. Wells Fargo repeatedly misapplied loan payments, wrongfully foreclosed on homes and illegally repossessed vehicles, incorrectly assessed fees and interest, and charged surprise overdraft fees, along with other illegal activity affecting over 16 million consumer accounts.
• Ordering Navy Federal Credit Union to pay more than $95 million for illegal surprise overdraft fees charged to sailors and other servicemembers, veterans, and consumers when the account had sufficient funds at the time of the purchase.
• Banning Navient from federal student loan servicing and ordering the company to pay $120 Million for wide-ranging student lending failures.
• Ordering Nationstar (also known as “Mr. Cooper”) to pay over $70 million for failing to honor mortgage payment arrangements after loan servicing transfers, wrongfully foreclosing on homeowners during reviews for assistance, impermissibly raising homeowners’ permanent monthly payments, and mishandling escrows and private mortgage insurance payments.
• Ordering the credit bureau Equifax to pay $15 million for improper investigations of credit reporting errors. Equifax failed to conduct adequate investigations of disputed information in credit reports.

Related Resources

• Press Release: Chopra Firing Brings Four Years of Pro-Consumer CFPB to a Rapid Close, Feb. 1, 2025
• CFPB: Fast Facts: CFPB by the Numbers
• The CFPB: Protecting Servicemembers and Veterans, Feb. 1, 2025
• Fact Sheet: CFPB’s Medical Debt Credit Reporting Rule Is a Lifeline to 15M People, Jan. 31, 2025
• Fact Sheet: Overdraft Rule Returns $5 Billion in Big Bank Junk Fees to Consumers’ Pockets, Jan. 29, 2025
• Fact Sheet: The CFPB Protects People From Abusive Debt Collection Practices, Jan. 29, 2025
• The CFPB: Promoting a Stable Housing Market, Jan. 28, 2025