The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau probably isn’t the most well-known federal agency, but the public has reason to celebrate its existence. Just this week, for example, NPR reported, “Led by Biden appointee Rohit Chopra, the [CFPB] has made medical debt a priority, going after aggressive collectors and exposing problematic practices across the medical debt industry. Earlier this year, the agency proposed landmark regulations to remove medical bills from consumer credit scores.”
There’s no shortage of related examples of the CFPB looking out for the American public. From taking on banks to the student loan industry, payday lenders to mortgage companies, the bureau — an idea first championed by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — has been one of the more important breakthroughs for progressive governance in the last decade.
The question, of course, is whether it’ll continue to do this work — or more to the point, whether it’ll be allowed to continue to do this work. NBC News reported:
Consumer advocates say they’re preparing for sweeping changes at one of Washington’s newest financial watchdogs under President-elect Donald Trump, whose allies have promised broad deregulation of companies that handle Americans’ money. … Republicans have signaled plans to defang the agency, and Trump has named authors of Project 2025 — which calls for eliminating the CFPB — to influential posts.
As recently as a week ago, conspiratorial billionaire and Trump backer Elon Musk published an online item that read, simply, “Delete CFPB.”
For now, let’s not dwell too long on the unsettling circumstances of seeing a powerful billionaire calling for the demise of an anti-corruption, pro-consumer agency. Let’s instead consider how the incoming Republican administration and GOP’s congressional majorities intend to undermine the CFPB’s work.
The Washington Post recently had a related report on this, noting that the president-elect and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill are eyeing “vast changes” to how the CFPB operates, including the imposition of new restrictions and “curtailing” the agency’s investigative powers.
In other words, Republicans are considering deliberate new steps that would make it easier for financial institutions to take advantage of American consumers. Chances are, a whole lot of voters — to the extent that they hear about this in the coming months — are likely to say this isn’t the kind of agenda they wanted when they backed GOP candidates in November. But that won’t be especially persuasive: Republicans have been gunning for the CFPB for years, and now the electorate has given them an opportunity to gut it. Writing for MSNBC, Helaine Olen added in a piece this week, “Over its almost 13 years, the agency has stopped numerous financial ripoffs and returned billions of dollars to the public. Its mere existence provides an ongoing demonstration of how the government can effectively stand up to big money interests and protect the American people.” These are the precisely the kind of efforts that many Republicans are eager to stop as quickly as possible.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
