Trump administration’s changes to the CFPB cost Americans $19B, a new report says
NEW YORK (AP) — A year after the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog has largely retreated from its enforcement and regulatory work; The changes have cost Americans at least $19 billion in financial aid, according to estimates from consumer advocates and Democrats.
In a report provided to The Associated Press by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office before it was released Monday, the authors say the CFPB has harmed consumers by abandoning basic consumer protections, stalling the investigation and dismissing a series of cases.
“Trump’s attempt to bypass the CFPB cost families billions of dollars last year alone,” said Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and also one of the bureau’s fiercest defenders in Congress.
The administration and Republicans in Congress have argued that the bureau must be scaled back and reined in because it has become too large and out of scope.
The administration assumed control of the CFPB in February 2025 after Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under President Joe Biden, resigned, leaving White House budget director Russell Vought as acting director. Very few new investigations have been opened since then. Many employees were ordered not to work and many pending enforcement cases against financial companies were dropped.
The White House announced in April that it wanted to reduce the number of Bureau staff from 1,689 to 207, but this move blocked by courts. Even if the employees’ union is successful in its lawsuit against Vought, Congress cut the bureau’s budget by nearly half with Trump’s One Big Good Bill Act. It is unlikely that all of these employees will still have their jobs after all the cases are resolved.
“The CFPB may still be standing, but it is essentially on life support,” Chuck Bell, advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. Consumer Reports released its own data Monday that reached similar conclusions as Warren’s office.
A CFPB spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
One of the relief avenues consumers rejected in the report was a cap on overdraft fees that the Biden CFPB finalized in 2024 but the Republican-led Congress overturned last year. This would save consumers $5 billion a year, the Bureau estimated at the time.
The bureau has also tried to limit the amount of money consumers pay credit card companies when they pay their bills late. This would save Americans about $10 billion, the Bureau estimated when the rule was proposed. The regulation was blocked by a federal court last year, and the office, which is under the control of the Trump administration, decided not to fight the case in court.
Another round of consumer relief, about $4 billion, would come from a series of lawsuits or settlements rejected by the bureau under Acting Director Vought. For example, the bureau sued Capital One for $2 billion in January 2025, days before President Trump’s inauguration, alleging that Capital One misrepresented to customers the interest rate paid on savings accounts. That case was dismissed.
The bureau also filed an $870 million lawsuit against Early Warning Systems, the company that operates money transfer service Zelle, in December 2024, alleging that EWS and the banks that operate Zelle were negligent in protecting consumers from fraud and fraud. This case was also rejected last year.
There was also a slowdown in the number of complaints resolved by the Bureau. The CFPB operates its own database of consumer complaints where a consumer can allege wrongdoing by their bank or financial services company, and the bureau will act as an intermediary between the consumer and the financial company to resolve the complaint. Under the Biden CFPB, nearly half of all consumer complaints were resolved with consumer relief, while under the Trump CFPB, that figure dropped to less than 5%.
The independent Government Accountability Office on Monday made public a separate report outlining the Trump administration’s attempts to pursue its reorganization and restructuring of the CFPB. The GAO said it had not received any cooperation from the White House or the bureau and that the GAO had to rely mostly on public records to prepare its report. In response to the GAO, the CFPB cited ongoing litigation among its employees and management as the primary reason for its failure to cooperate.
GAO’s report largely matches what has been documented in news reports that the bureau rescinded dozens of enforcement actions against alleged wrongdoers and unresolved rules and regulations that previous bureau management said would protect consumers or bring them financial relief. President Trump’s first term even enacted rules and regulations that have been targeted by the bureau’s current administration.
Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer and deputy director under Vought, called the GAO’s report “biased and flawed” in a letter to the agency and did not address any specific problems with its conclusions, other than to say the GAO was working with incomplete information.
