The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau removed at least 2,228 webpages from its website last month, the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to scale back or eliminate the federal consumer finance watchdog, according to an analysis published Thursday by the Guardian.
The deleted content includes press releases, consumer advisories, congressional testimonies, speeches, and blog posts, some dating to 2010, when the agency was created. The Guardian identified the removals by comparing the current version of the CFPB website with captures from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a mirror site created by a former employee. The count is likely an undercount because it depends on pages that had previously been archived by internet users.
“With the page deletions, the desire is to delete the story of the CFPB up until now and to start telling a new story, that the CFPB is in the way of innovation and that the CFPB is hurting, rather than helping, consumers,” said Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform, who worked at the CFPB as a policy adviser to senior leadership until December 2025.
The webpages covered enforcement actions, mortgage lending oversight, banking regulation, and rulemaking. They include testimonies that CFPB directors are required to deliver twice a year before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees. Acting director Russell Vought, the White House budget director whom President Donald Trump appointed last February, appears to have skipped both required testimonies so far, the Guardian reported.
Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, which called for abolishing the CFPB, ordered agency employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases, and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff. A federal judge blocked the firings in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings show agency leadership aims to reduce the workforce from 1,174 employees to 556.
Since its creation after the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has returned more than $21 billion to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the administration’s moves to cut enforcement and rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions.
“Industry doesn’t like the mission, and Russell Vought has implemented their wishes to undermine it,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit consortium of consumer rights organizations.
The website changes also removed access for non-English speakers. The agency eliminated a filter that allowed users to view news posts in nine languages and removed a translation menu at the top of the site that rendered content in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. The Guardian found at least 129 posts in Spanish, three in Chinese, and one in Arabic were deleted.
“Limited-proficiency English speakers do get exploited, and sometimes they do get exploited based on their limited English ability,” said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting and data advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union.
Consumer complaints have surged during the same period. A record 5.4 million complaints were submitted in 2025, double the number in 2024, according to a Guardian analysis of CFPB complaint data. Complaints cover issues including errors on credit reports and violations of fair debt collection laws.
Since the removals were first reported two weeks ago, the CFPB added a note to its newsroom page linking to an archived version of the newsroom page frozen from last year. “News items published before February 2025 can be found in the archives,” the note states. However, the Guardian found that several links within the archived page, hosted by a third-party vendor, were broken. Most deleted content is not available elsewhere on other government websites.
“The message now is more like ‘the government is no longer offering this information,’” Feltner said. “It’s clear that this is not an administration that is listening to consumers, responding to their concerns, or addressing the issues that they raised. It is primarily focused on the rollback of consumer protections that I think are making consumers and the economy less safe.”
The CFPB did not respond to questions from the Guardian about why the pages were deleted.