Created after the 2008 financial crash, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is that rare Washington creature: An efficient consumer watchdog. Over the years, it has returned many billions in relief for people who got fleeced by Wall Street and Main Street alike. In Trump’s America, it is unsurprisingly fighting for its life.
On August 15, 2025, a federal appeals court dealt a major setback to the bureau by lifting a preliminary injunction that had temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plan for mass layoffs. In a 2-1 decision, the DC Circuit said the lower court lacked jurisdiction, then left a temporary stay in place while a new hearing is considered, which means the axe could still fall. For now, however, the CFPB’s future looks precarious, at best.
The bureau’s peril is not a coincidence. It is the plan. From the moment he returned to the White House, Trump made clear he wanted to dismantle the CFPB, and he enlisted the new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to help. DOGE, then run by X and Tesla owner Elon Musk, moved quickly to attack. The trouble for them was that, far from being useless, the CFPB had already returned more than $21bn to Americans’ pockets since its creation. During that meltdown, the US shed about 8.7 million jobs and millions of families lost their homes, a scale of harm that prompted Congress to act. In response, in 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, which established the CFPB as an independent watchdog over banks, lenders and credit card companies, exactly the kind of “efficiency” target DOGE wanted to kill off.
From the outset, the CFPB has handled consumer complaints through an online database, carried out research, written rules, and issued guidance on both traditional and emerging financial products. It also investigates, litigates and takes enforcement action against corporations that break consumer protection laws.
Under its third director, Rohit Chopra, the bureau proved almost too effective for its own good. It pursued Wall Street’s scams and banks’ predatory products, winning high-profile victories, including a $120m settlement with Navient for abusive student-loan practices in 2024 and a $3.7bn order against Wells Fargo, including a $1.7bn civil penalty, for illegally repossessing cars, freezing accounts and more.
But what truly rattled the tech barons was the CFPB’s push to bring fintech platforms under the same scrutiny as traditional banks. Its move to police digital wallets and peer-to-peer apps, alongside proposed personal-data protections, had Silicon Valley fuming. Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Cash App and X, with its ambitions in peer-to-peer payments, suddenly faced the prospect of CFPB oversight. It was the kind of scrutiny Big Tech wanted least.
There is a straight line from some of the biggest donors to Trump’s campaign and inauguration to companies either under CFPB investigation or threatened by its rules. Elon Musk contributed more than $250m to pro-Trump efforts, and he owns Tesla, which is the subject of hundreds of consumer complaints in the CFPB’s database. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz together gave at least $5m to a pro-Trump PAC, and previously backed LendUp, a payday-style lender that the CFPB pursued for deceptive practices, culminating in court-ordered consumer payments totalling nearly $40m.
For now, the bureau’s staff has a brief reprieve, but the administration has signalled it will keep only a statutory skeleton crew to protect millions of households from corporate overreach and abuse. Defunding and defanging the CFPB hands Wall Street a win while Americans pick up the bill.
The costs to consumers are already showing up. Since Trump’s team took control of CFPB policy, a Texas federal court at the Bureau’s own request vacated the $8 cap on most credit-card late fees, a cap that the CFPB had estimated would save households more than $10bn per year. Congress and the president also nullified the 2024 overdraft rule, which would have capped fees at $5 or required banks to charge only their break-even cost, a change the CFPB said could save consumers up to $5bn annually. The administration has dismissed 22 pending enforcement cases, and it terminated much of a $60m Toyota Motor Credit order, waiving roughly $42m in redress, while slashing Wise US Inc’s civil penalty from about $2.025m to roughly $45,000. That is tens of millions in consumer relief wiped away.
Consumers are left to fend for themselves. Despite conservatives’ nostalgia for the good old days, for most Americans, we are returning to the bad old days, when corporate greed goes unchecked, rules are tilted towards Wall Street, and people’s access to credit plummets because of medical or student-loan debt.
Unless states act, that is. Although states lack the resources and, in some cases, the robust authority to protect consumers in the same way the CFPB did, they can still tackle some of the predatory tactics and products the bureau pursued. After Trump weakened the bureau in his first term, California created the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI), modelled on the CFPB.
On February 4, 2025, Illinois legislators introduced Senate Bill 1512 to establish a state-level consumer-protection regime modelled on California’s approach, but as of today, it remains in committee and has not advanced. Other blue states are considering similar approaches or re-adopting recently revoked CFPB rules and guidance.
If states do manage to strengthen their consumer protection laws, the result will be a patchwork of strong protections in some places and weak ones in others, which harms households in weaker states and forces businesses to follow different rules state by state. The demise of the CFPB will harm hard-working families, veterans and seniors, while corporate profits climb and Silicon Valley and Wall Street celebrate. That is the future Trump, Musk and their allies are writing: One where corporate predators run free and Americans are told to tighten their belts.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
