Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it | Trump administration

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau deleted at least 2,200 web pages from its website last month; Proponents of the move say it is part of the Trump administration’s latest effort to eliminate the federal consumer finance watchdog.

All of the removed content was published before Trump’s second term and includes press releases, consumer alerts, congressional testimony, speeches and blog posts. Some of the material dates back to 2010, when the agency was founded.

“This is a desire to erase the story of the CFPB so far and start telling a new story that the CFPB is in the way of innovation and that the CFPB is harming consumers rather than helping them,” said Tom Feltner, deputy director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform. He previously worked as a policy advisor to senior leadership at the CFPB and left in December 2025.

The removal of the web page comes as the Trump administration was actively trying to shut down the agency last year.

Last February, Trump appointed White House budget director Russell Vought as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025. abolition of agency. Since then, the CFPB has ordered its employees to cease all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases, and attempted to fire most of the agency’s staff; The move was blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit filed by the agency’s staff union. Last court records It reveals that agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556.

Deletion of the office’s website content first reported Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit consortium of consumer rights organizations, said Bloomberg’s move is just the latest piece of a larger plan to “undermine an institution that helps people.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products, and force companies to contact consumers when they file complaints.

The office has made more than one comeback since its inception. 21 billion dollars through monetary compensation to consumers and canceled debts. Democratic Senate banking committee report The report, released this year, found that the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to deregulate the industry cost consumers billions of dollars last year.

“[The CFPB have] “Rust has rebalanced the differences between big banks and ordinary people,” he said. “But the industry doesn’t like that mission, and Russell Vought has followed through on their desire to undermine that mission.”

The CFPB did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about why the web pages were deleted.

‘This is not a management that listens to the consumer’

To count how many web pages have been deleted, the Guardian compared the current version of the CFPB website with versions saved in the Internet Archive’s “return machine” and found a Mirror CFPB websiteCreated by a former CFPB employee and retains all web page content dating back to February 2025.

According to the Guardian’s analysis, at least 2,228 posts from 17 September 2010 to 30 January 2025 were deleted from the website’s “Newsroom” page. This is likely an undercount, especially for non-English content, because it only counts posts previously saved by internet users.

Removed content covers a wide range of formats and topics, from consumer warnings about what to do when you remove your product. Home insurance costs are rising And know-your-rights pages for veterans, to CFPB executives’ testimony before the House financial services and Senate banking committees, to testimony the executives are required to give twice a year. (Vought looks like he jumped So far, both.) A lot conversations Also gone are changes made by Elizabeth Warren, the senator who helped found the CFPB.

Overall, the most common topics covered in deleted posts were foreclosures, mortgages, banking and rulemaking, according to the Guardian’s review of metadata in archived posts.

In addition to mass deletions of posts, the CFPB’s newsroom page is also being updated less frequently. Only 16 posts left from February 2025 to March 2026.

By contrast, in December 2024, the final month before Trump begins his second term, the CFPB issued 28 postings. One of these speech Former CFPB director Rohit Chopra described how the bureau could crack down on data brokers who sell sensitive personal information to fraudsters. Press release about a lawsuit the CFPB filed against the nation’s three largest banks for allowing fraud on peer-to-peer payment apps like Zelle and Cash App, and announcement The agency reportedly distributed $1.8 billion back to more than 4 million consumers who were charged illegal fees by two credit repair companies.

Advocates say the lack of public sharing signals both a break in previous agency leaders’ track record on transparency and how out of touch the Trump administration is with consumer needs.

“It is clear that this is not an administration that listens to consumers, responds to their concerns or addresses the issues they raise,” Feltner said. “The focus is primarily on rolling back consumer protections that I think make consumers and the economy less safe.”

The infrequent posts are noticeably more partisan and largely concerned with rolling back previous regulations and policies.

first post Following Vought’s takeover, the agency announced it would reinstate the CFPB’s previous “six-figure financial penalty” imposed on a Chicago-based company for racial disparities in mortgage lending. “The CFPB abused its power by operating a ‘red line curtain’ and used “radical ‘equality’ arguments” to bring down the company,” the post states.

Other posts announce scaling back enforcement of wage advance lender regulations; reducing penalties from $2 million to $45,000 for an electronic money services provider that misled consumers about its fees; and withdrawing a declaration prohibiting creditors from using the applicant’s citizenship status in credit granting decisions.

Removal of language accessibility as consumer complaints soar

The agency also removed several tools for non-English speakers to access the site, including a filter to display news posts in nine other languages ​​and a menu at the top of the CFPB website that translated it into Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic and Haitian Creole.

Advocates say this means important consumer alerts and web pages on how to submit consumer complaints — about how people have been harmed and potentially receive financial help — will no longer be accessible to non-English speakers.

The Guardian’s analysis found that at least 129 posts in Spanish, three in Chinese and one in Arabic were deleted.

“Limited proficiency English speakers are being exploited, and sometimes they are exploited because of their limited English ability,” said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting and data advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, which is also a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit filed by the office staff union.

This comes as consumer complaints of all kinds, from errors on credit reports to violations of fair debt collection laws, reached the highest levels in the agency’s history during Trump’s second term. A record 5.4 million complaints were filed in 2025, according to the Guardian analysis of CFPB complaint data; This is double the figure in 2024.

Broken links

Since the removal operations are carried out first reported Two weeks ago, the CFPB added a way for users to access some of the deleted pages. A note at the top of the newsroom page includes a link that directs users to a version of the newsletters page that was frozen last year.

As of the moment of publication on the site, it is stated that “News published before February 2025 can be found in the archives.”

However, the Guardian’s review of the archived page hosted by a third-party vendor revealed that some links to the full press releases were broken. Most deleted content is not available on another agency or federal website.

“Removing this from a government agency site and saying you can always find it in the archive or the ‘return machine’ is a very different message you are sending to consumers,” Feltner said.

The message now is more along the lines of “the government is no longer providing this information,” according to Feltner.

Methodology

The Guardian used the Internet Archive to check all the following web pages: consumerfinance.gov. we found more than 5,000 URLs after clearing results for duplicate pages. We filtered the pages below. Newsroom directory where most deletions occurand checked to see each the web page was still online. After confirming To determine the cases, we collected the original pages from the Internet Archive and performed an analysis of the content of each page.

The Guardian’s “Deleted data” series explores how much critical US government information has been deleted and what the consequences will be, preserving or recreating lost datasets. If you have information about, or would like to share, any datasets, web pages, or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year We’d love to hear from you how these changes affect you. Please contact us at delete-data@theguardian.com.