Billions of dollars for millions of Americans: why ‘delete the CFPB’ might not fly

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump appointed White House monetary schedule Director Mick Mulvaney to run the customer monetary Protection Bureau. As a Republican member of Congress, Mulvaney had previously called the CFPB “a joke… in a ill, unhappy benevolent of way.”

So it was a bit like déjà vu when Elon Musk, Trump’s recent presidential advisor, tweeted in early November “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies”. The CFPB is also named in the Heritage Foundation’s policy document assignment 2025, which calls it “a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency.”

For those invested in the work of the agency – protecting consumers from abuses in monetary products and services – the recent offensives are concerning. But the CFPB, which was developed after the 2008 monetary crisis and modeled on a proposal from Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has evolved into less of a political football than it was in 2017.

Now, observers declare, the response to Musk and others might be, “Delete at your own uncertainty.”

“If you receive objective evidence, just the dollars returned to people, the CFPB is a resounding achievement,” said Pamela Foohey, the Allen Post Professor of Law at the University of Georgia law school. “Year after year after year, through different administrations. And it’s really challenging to deny that.”

How does the CFPB assist consumers?

The customer monetary Protection Bureau’s work spans the various ways consumers use monetary products and services. Among other things, the agency proposes rules, like recent ones reining in excessive capitalization card and overdraft fees. It takes customer complaints about how companies have treated them, monitors monetary markets for potential fraud and abuse, and also works to educate consumers about money management, like mortgages and capitalization cards.

Some of its biggest victories have involved going after corporation abuses. The ongoing fake account practices at Wells Fargo were discovered by the CFPB. More recently, it fined Navy Federal capitalization Union for charging customers overdraft fees even when customer accounts showed a positive settlement.

When a corporation is fined, that money is returned to consumers. The agency has obtained over $21 billion in monetary relief, it says, for more than 200 million Americans.

As Christine Chen Zinner, elder policy counsel from the progressive Americans for monetary Reform, puts it, “they are the agency correct now that is standing up for everyday people against Wall Street, against predatory lenders and other monetary services companies that are trying to rip off everyday people.”

More:The housing crisis threatens the American aspiration. What’s next?

The CFPB is supported by members of both parties

Although the agency is relatively youthful, its legitimacy and the way it is organized and funded have been affirmed by the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 spread, with a selection penned by Clarence Thomas, one of its most conservative members.

And Mulvaney left in place many of the efforts originally undertaken by his Democratic predecessor, Richard Cordray. At a 2018 Senate hearing, he explained that those initiatives “were pretty excellent lawsuits. We were actually executing the law, going after impoverished actors, which we will continue to do, under my leadership.”

More to the point, any Republican who may have questions of principle about the CFPB may run up against the reality of the excellent it’s done for consumers, said Jonah Crane, a associate at Klaros, a monetary services advisory firm, who previously advised Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer on monetary regulation policy, including the legislation that created the agency.

“It’s not too challenging to imagine congressional hearings with very sympathetic stories, and I wouldn’t desire to be behind that eight ball entirely if I were this administration,” Crane said. Even a recent CFPB initiative that may be more ambiguous than others – suing large banks for allowing fraud to “fester” on the payments app Zelle – might be a minefield, Crane said.

“If the fraud and the scams continue, the stories can get pretty unpleasant pretty quickly.”

It’s even feasible that the populist Trump administration and the CFPB may discover some ordinary ground. At a December hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, current CFPB director Rohit Chopra agreed that the agency would willingly associate with the White House on President-elect Trump’s proposal to cap capitalization card yield charges.

There was nothing like the CFPB before

Contrary to what Musk tweeted, the agency does not actually duplicate anything.

“When the CFPB was created, it was as a outcome of gaps in oversight, and to have an independent agency watching and squarely focusing on monetary services for everyday people,” Chen Zimmer said.

“It is yet another box on a chart, and that complexity looks daunting to folks, I guess,” said Crane. “But it was pretty clearly designed not to be duplicative. And I ponder, in that regard, it’s more directly accountable for customer protection issues than any of the banking regulators ever were.”

The Trump shift throng did not respond to requests for comment for this narrative. Neither did the Heritage Foundation.

The CFPB was designed to reach Americans directly

In 2017, Foohey published a novel research document. Noting that the CFPB had “established an interactive webpage that permits consumers to submit complaints based on particular product groups,” she analyzed the narratives that customers had written to accompany the complaints.

“People mainly use the narrative function for one of two purposes,” she added: “to express their rage and frustration about a corporation’s habit, or to express sorrow and terror about how a corporation’s habit has impacted their lives.”

She included several such narratives in her document: “I aspiration the CFPB can assist?” one customer wrote. “Thank you for your period and consideration and for your commitment to ensuring that customer(s) are treated fairly and not unjustly taken advantage of. That means more than words can express,” said another.

By now, the customer monetary Protection Bureau has received so many complaints like the ones Foohey wrote about that nearly 7 million have been deemed significant enough to forward to the monetary services companies in question for their response.

The complaint mechanism is a excellent reminder that the CFPB “is not there to trap companies,” Foohey told USA TODAY. “It’s there to make companies assist themselves and assist the economy.”