Summary
One year after the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, consumer advocates and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office said the agency has pulled back from enforcement and regulatory work—an outcome they linked to at least $19 billion in lost financial relief for Americans. The assessment was laid out in a report prepared for a release by Warren’s office, provided to The Associated Press on Sunday ahead of Monday’s release.
Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said Trump’s attempt to sideline the bureau has imposed billions of dollars in costs on families over the past year. She described the CFPB’s shift as a retreat from major consumer protections, including actions that she said would have prevented overdraft-fee charges and limited costs when consumers pay credit cards late.
According to the AP report, the Trump administration assumed control of the CFPB in February 2025 after Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under President Joe Biden, resigned and left White House budget director Russell Vought as acting director. Since then, the report said, few new investigations have been opened, many employees have been ordered not to work, and several pending enforcement actions against financial companies have been dropped.
The assessment also tied the reduced consumer benefits to the bureau’s decisions around specific regulations and litigation. It said one form of relief that consumers were denied was a limit on overdraft fees—something the Biden CFPB finalized in 2024 but which a Republican-led Congress overturned the following year, with the CFPB estimating the change would have saved consumers $5 billion a year. The report further said the CFPB had tried to cap costs charged to credit card companies when consumers pay bills late, which it estimated at roughly $10 billion in consumer savings; a federal court blocked the regulation last year, and the bureau, under Trump administration control, chose not to fight the lawsuit in court.
The AP report described additional claimed losses of roughly $4 billion in consumer relief tied to lawsuits and settlements the bureau dismissed under Vought. It cited a Capital One case in January 2025 in which the bureau sued for $2 billion over allegations that the company misrepresented the interest rate paid on savings accounts; the AP report said the lawsuit was later dismissed. It also described a December 2024 suit against Early Warning Systems, the company that runs Zelle, in which the bureau sought $870 million alleging negligence in protecting consumers from fraud and scams; the AP report said that case was also dismissed.
Consumer advocates also pointed to a slowdown in how quickly complaints were resolved through the CFPB’s consumer complaint process. The AP report said that under the Biden CFPB, roughly half of all consumer complaints were resolved with relief for the consumer, while under the Trump CFPB the share dropped to less than 5%.
Separately, the Associated Press said the Government Accountability Office issued another report Monday about its efforts to track the Trump administration’s reorganization and restructuring of the CFPB. The GAO said it received no cooperation from the White House or the bureau and needed to rely mostly on public records to prepare its findings, while the CFPB responded by citing ongoing litigation between its employees and management.
The AP report said the GAO’s findings largely matched what other reporting had described about the CFPB canceling dozens of enforcement actions, unwinding rules and regulations previously promoted as consumer protections, and targeting rules enacted during President Trump’s first term. In a letter to the agency, Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer and effectively deputy director under Vought, called the GAO’s report “biased and flawed” and did not raise specific objections to the conclusions other than asserting that the GAO had worked with incomplete information.
For its part, Chuck Bell, advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, said in a statement that “The CFPB may still be standing, but it’s essentially on life support.” The AP report said Consumer Reports released data Monday reaching similar conclusions to Warren’s office, while a spokeswoman for the CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.
The administration and congressional Republicans have argued that the bureau needed to be downsized and reined in because it had grown too large and overreaching. The AP report said the White House announced in April that it wanted to cut the bureau’s staff from 1,689 positions to 207, a change that courts blocked, and that Congress cut the bureau’s budget by roughly half in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—leaving open whether employees represented in those reductions will remain after litigation concludes.