The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), shut down by the Trump administration in 2018, has been slowly inching back to life. A court order paused and later reversed the agency’s efforts to shut it down, allowing its staff to resume their work on a backlog of 16,000 complaints.
In February, the bureau’s consumer response team was called back to work to tackle the complaints, including those from homeowners facing imminent foreclosures. The Fair Lending Office resumed preparing its annual report to Congress, and the agency’s website is now functioning again.
The CFPB’s survival has become a test case for President Trump’s power to unilaterally hobble government agencies. The bureau was created in 2011 to regulate lending practices and protect consumers. Its staff includes over 80 specific duties, including responding to consumer complaints and enforcing federal laws governing mortgage lending disclosures.
Despite the administration’s attempts to gut the agency, its leaders stated that it would “survive in name only.” However, a court filing revealed that one senior executive predicted the bureau would be reduced to just five employees. The personnel office eventually approved the Trump administration’s plan to cut an estimated 1,175 workers, but a lawyer for the bureau’s union sought a restraining order to prevent the terminations.
A judge ultimately approved a consent order pausing the layoffs and has been monitoring whether the Trump officials were addressing the agency’s explicit tasks. The case is ongoing, with the next deadline for extending or ending the pause scheduled for March 28.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/business/trump-cfpb.html