One Year Without the CFPB Protecting Consumers

One year ago this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was forced to stop protecting consumers. On February 2, 2025 a team from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at the agency’s headquarters. Within a day, CFPB employees were ordered to stop working. Later, the lease to the agency’s headquarters was cancelled and the Trump-Vance administration issued layoff notices to more than 2/3s of the CFPB staff.

The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis, where underregulated scam mortgages – mixed up into complex financial instruments that nobody understood – brought the whole economy to its knees, causing millions to lose their jobs, their homes, and their retirement savings. The CFPB was built to safeguard consumers and make sure it never happened again.

And the CFPB delivered. From its founding through 2024, it has gotten money back for consumers that were harmed on more than 205 million occasions, including refunds and restitution from banks and financial firms, totaling $21 billion in monetary payments. I’ve seen firsthand how the CFPB protects consumers - I served as a lawyer and civil servant in the Legal Division and as a Senior Advisor in the Director’s office. 

So, what does a year look like without the CFPB and the civil servants who make it work?

It looks like more work to get help when you have a problem. One of the coolest – and most unique – CFPB programs is its complaint portal, which allows consumers to get answers quickly from their banks or companies that provide financial services. Here’s how it works. Consumers send a complaint through the CFPB to a company it regulates. The agency monitors the database for patterns and then after 15 days makes each complaint public (minus your sensitive information), which gives the companies incentives to be responsive. And they were. By the beginning of 2025, 6.8 million CFPB consumer complaints were answered, 98% within 15 days. 

Complaints are the quickest CFPB enabled-avenue for a consumer to take care of an unexplained fee on their credit card statement or a lender debiting the wrong amount from their account. But, in the last year, nearly all the CFPB staff that support the consumer complaint database received layoff notices – the relevant division is to be reduced from 135 to eight employees. These impending layoffs reduce the incentive for companies to take complaints seriously and provide appropriate relief. Analysis of the public complaint data shows that consumers who got monetary relief from their complaint dropped by 50% while denial of relief increased 24% from 2024 to 2025. 

But it wasn’t just the consumer complaint portal support staff that were impacted. The CFPB’s consumer education team used to regularly release high-quality, unbiased, plain language guides about topics like how to pick a credit mortgage or what to do if there’s a mistake on your credit card bill. The CFPB also had special teams focused on confronting issues that affect students, seniors, and servicemembers. All of these teams are slated to be cut by at least 75 percent and the financial education website was not updated in 2025. All this means there are now fewer trustworthy sources of information when you’re trying to make consequential financial decisions. 

And there are now fewer inspections at banks and other financial services companies. Regulating financial products is just like regulating food safety – the consequences of something going wrong are so dire that the government sends inspectors into financial companies to make sure that they’re following the rules and to help them figure out how to apply the rules to new situations. 

Except the CFPB has all but stopped inspections. CFPB has projected shrinking the number of inspectors significantly and eliminating examination of non-bank financial companies – like financial technology companies – where the CFPB is the only federal regulator with authority to conduct an inspection. It has also proposed eliminating inspections anywhere in America except for the Southeastern region of the United States, not because of risk but because of “lower cost of living” in that region. 

These cuts also mean there is no muscular law enforcement taking companies that break the law to court. In the last year of then CFPB Director Rohit Chopra’s tenure, the CFPB took more than three dozen enforcement actions to punish violations of consumer protection laws, get consumers compensation for past harm, or put in place forward-looking guardrails to prevent repeat legal violations. In the first year of the second Trump administration, the CFPB has taken just one enforcement action. That is in line with the CFPB’s plan to shrink the Enforcement division from 248 employees to 50.

Not only that, but the Trump-Vance CFPB has attempted to undo agreements to settle lawsuits between companies and the CFPB  – stopping ongoing payouts to consumers that companies had already promised to make them whole and in some cases, ending enhanced checks on the companies to make sure they don’t break the law again. This is not business as usual for a change of administration – a federal judge has called the tactic unprecedented.

Fortunately, CFPB employees and their allies are not accepting the dismantling of their agency. They are demonstrating, advocating – and fighting back in court, often with the help of Democracy Forward and its allies. For example, largely due to litigation, as of late January 2026, about 1200 of an original 1800 CFPB staff are still employed by the agency even if they are not allowed to do their jobs. In addition, thanks to Democracy Forward, its brave clients and allies, the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to defund CFPB have so far failed. Democracy Forward, representing a broad coalition, is also stepping in to defend the protections CFPB has historically enacted for consumers where this administration has abandoned them and has recently filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the City of Baltimore opposing the Trump-Vance administration’s argument that its policy to dismantle the CFPB is unreviewable under the Administrative Procedures Act because it is unwritten.

As part of DemocracyWorks 250, Civil Service Strong plans to examine ways to rebuild and reimagine agencies that protect consumers, like the CFPB, to deliver on their essential missions. Over the next year, we will be focused on understanding what capacities the staff of an even stronger modern consumer regulator should have, including understanding what disciplines of professionals the regulators need to hire to provide excellent service to consumers and keep up with the firms they regulate. One of the CFPB’s strengths has always been its ability to understand emerging risks to consumers without losing sight of today’s challenges. We hope to do the same. If you’d like to be part of that conversation, reach out.