The Trump administration is looting American households and deleting the receipts. It is helping corporate America rob its citizens. The cop on the consumer beat has been walked off the force, and the federal agency built to stop the robbery is being emptied of its essential records.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Congress’s most explicit post-2008 answer to predatory corporate conduct, is being dismantled in real time. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association of America explicitly upheld the bureau’s funding structure—denying a legal challenge to its existence—but the administration bypassed that judicial endorsement. It found alternative routes: budget starvation, personnel attrition, and rule rescission. It has deleted thousands of webpages that once told citizens how to file a complaint and what the law required. The data that allowed the public to track systemic patterns of corporate abuse has been purged. The watchdog is blind; its enforcement capacity has been gutted. The administration now asks citizens to document their rage at shoddy products and impossible refunds, having already disabled the referee. It already knows the answer. It was the one emptying the department of its essential records.
This is not an isolated failure of regulation. It is a dual assault. The Roberts Court, in West Virginia v. EPA, 142 S. Ct. 2587, 2609 (2022), deployed the major-questions doctrine to narrow the jurisdictional scope of regulatory agencies, requiring explicit congressional language before agencies could claim broad powers. That doctrine insulates corporate activity from scrutiny. Combined with the executive’s systematic deletion of agency webpages, the documentation framework that once forced disclosures, standardized contracts, and tracked systemic fraud has been dismantled. The Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. § 45, once required regulated entities to produce internal records and establish dispute-resolution timelines; that apparatus has been erased. The administrative record that a working citizen could use to navigate the complaint pipeline is gone. The bureaucratic infrastructure did not wait for a statute to strip its authority; it dismantled its own complaint-tracking mechanisms.
Into that vacuum the administration has poured executive fiat. It imposed tariffs on imported goods without statutory authority, levying taxes that have no counterpart in congressional commerce-clause delegation. When Congress later opened a refund mechanism for those levies, the mechanism was engineered to require the same administrative literacy the deleted webpages were meant to supply. Citizens must navigate a labyrinth of digital forms to reclaim money extracted via an executive order exceeding statutory bounds. The mechanism does not correct the extraction; it shifts the burden of proof from the sovereign to the extracted.
This is the infrastructure of urban extraction operating at scale. Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America (2023) establishes that this extraction from urban households is not a condition of poverty but its direct cause. The deleted webpages, the withdrawn refund mechanics, and the tariff impositions are the administrative instruments that convert household liquidity into sovereign revenue without congressional consent. They leave the citizen economically defenseless.
There is no longer a federal referee. The CFPB has been gutted of enforcement capacity; the FTC’s leadership has been reoriented toward trade protectionism. There is no easy path to the courthouse. The Roberts Court solidified mandatory arbitration in Epic Systems v. Lewis, 584 U.S. 497 (2018): the fine print protects corporations from class-action collective action. There is no shield at the state level, either; the administration leverages aggressive doctrines of federal preemption to override state consumer laws. The consumer is left isolated, atomized, and exhausted, alone with a broken product and a phone number that never answers.
The state has withdrawn its referee. The robber is in the store, the vault is open, and the administration’s response is a reader survey asking customers how they feel about being robbed. The federal government chose the robber. It deleted the receipts. The audit is gone because the mechanism that produced it was deleted.