![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/unnamed-36-1080x635-1.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Willie Sutton famously said he robbed banks \u201cbecause that\u2019s where the money was.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has taken the opposite approach: it goes where the money was taken\u2014and gives it back to the people who were fleeced. This often includes seniors, members of the military, or lower paid government employees themselves.<\/p>\n
That, apparently, is the problem.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has crippled the CFPB for over a year with spending freezes and cuts while saying the agency hurts banks by overregulating them. Twenty-one states responded in December with a lawsuit in order to block Trump from further gutting the CFPB.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit will\u00a0hearoral arguments\u00a0this\u00a0week\u00a0in an appeal from the National Treasury Employees Union and other plaintiffs. The appellate judges will decide the fate of the agency.<\/p>\n
This is not an abstract bureaucratic dispute. It has immediate, concrete consequences.<\/p>\n
A new\u00a0report\u00a0by Sen. Elizabeth Warren\u2019s (D-MA) office showed that Americans have lost nearly $19 billion since Trump took office again directly due to CFPB cuts<\/p>\n
According to CFPB data, 22 pending enforcement actions against banks were dropped between January and October of last year, while only one new action was filed in all of 2025. Enforcement has not been \u201creformed\u201d; it has been functionally switched off.
If this continues, the CFPB will soon be unable to protect consumers from predatory lending, abusive fees, and outright fraud. What replaces it is not a free market, but a patchwork of state laws and voluntary compliance, a system that historically costs consumers billions in excess fees, higher interest rates, reduced access to credit, and damaged credit scores\u2014especially for those already struggling financially.<\/p>\n
A less known aspect of the CFPB is the so-called \u201cSmall Dollar Rule,\u201d which was designed to protect borrowers from abusive payday lending practices, particularly repeated attempts to debit bank accounts that trigger cascading fees. That goal is laudable. But the rule\u2019s structure may have unintended consequences. By requiring borrowers to reauthorize any failed payment from their own bank account or debit card without the lender\u2019s prompting proactively, it risks turning missed payments into silent defaults. For many low-income borrowers, life friction, not bad faith, prevents timely reauthorization. The result can be increased negative credit reporting and long-term credit damage for the very people the rule aims to protect. Good consumer protection policy like the Small Dollar\u00a0Rule can backfire when it ignores real-world behavior.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shuttering the CFPB without fixing this broken ecosystem\u2014and without demanding that banks provide lower-cost options or supporting alternatives like postal banking\u2014only deepens Americans\u2019 dependence on high-interest debt. It is consumer protection in reverse.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0massive\u00a0win\u00a0for consumers has been the reduction in bank NSF overdraft fees. Since the CFPB raised attention to the issue in 2022, banks and financial institutions agreed to refund more than $240 million to customers. This includes almost $177 million in unfair expected overdraft fees charged on transactions that were made when a customer had sufficient funds at the time of purchase in their account, along with nearly $64 million in duplicate NSF fees charged on the exact same transaction that already incurred a fee when\u00a0it was previously declined the first time.<\/p>\n
According\u00a0to a Center for American Progress\u00a0analysis, the five biggest issues consumers asked the CFPB for help with were: wrong information on a consumer\u2019s credit report, improper use of a consumer\u2019s credit or other personal report, a problem with a company\u2019s investigation into an existing problem, a problem\u00a0with a credit reporting company\u2019s investigation into an existing problem, and attempts to collect debt not owed by the customer.Those numbers explain the hostility. When you make predatory behavior expensive, powerful predators complain.<\/p>\n
The DC court cannot allow this White House to erase an agency that has returned tens of billions of dollars to Americans who were cheated, misled, or outright robbed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As it hopefully reclaims its authority, Congress also needs to explore credit alternatives\u2014so consumers aren\u2019t forced to keep paying ransom to the same institutions that insist regulation is the real problem.<\/p>\n
After all, when the money keeps flowing out of ordinary Americans\u2019 pockets and into bank coffers, it\u2019s not hard to see who benefits when the watchdog goes away.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em>Fortune.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Consumer #Financial #Protection #Bureau #threat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Willie Sutton famously said he… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[14609,9408,1953,14610,121,3752,615],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}