NEW YORK (AP) — A year after the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog has largely pulled back from enforcement and regulatory work, changes that consumer advocates and Democrats now estimate have cost Americans at least $19 billion in financial relief.
In a report provided to The Associated Press ahead of its release by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office on Monday, the authors say the CFPB has harmed consumers by giving up major consumer protections, stalling the investigation and dismissing a number of lawsuits.
“Trump’s attempt to roll back the CFPB has cost families billions of dollars in the last year alone,” said Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee as well as one of the bureau’s staunchest defenders in Congress.
The administration and congressional Republicans argued that the office needed to be scaled back and controlled because it had grown too large and exceeded capacity.
The administration assumed control of the CFPB in February 2025 after Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under President Joe Biden, resigned, leaving White House Budget Director Russell Vought as acting director. Since then, few new investigations have been opened, many employees have been ordered off work, and several pending enforcement actions against financial companies have been dropped.
The White House announced in April that it wanted to reduce the Bureau’s staff from 1,689 positions to 207 positions, but that move was blocked by the courts. Even if the employees’ union succeeds in its lawsuit against Vought, Congress cut the bureau’s budget by roughly half in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. It is unlikely that all of these employees will still have their jobs once all of the litigation is resolved.
“The CFPB may still be standing, but it’s essentially on life support,” Chuck Bell, advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. Consumer Reports released its own data on Monday that reaches similar conclusions to those of Warren’s office.
A CFPB spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
One form of relief the report said consumers were denied was a cap on overdraft fees, which Biden’s CFPB finalized in 2024 but the Republican-led Congress rescinded last year. That would have saved consumers $5 billion a year, the Bureau estimated at the time.
The bureau has also tried to limit the amount of money consumers pay credit card companies when they pay their bills late. This would have saved Americans about $10 billion, the Bureau estimated when the rule was proposed. The regulation was blocked by a federal court last year, and the bureau, under the control of the Trump administration, has decided not to fight the lawsuit in court.
Another roughly $4 billion in consumer relief would have come from a series of lawsuits or settlements that were rejected by the office under Acting Director Vought. For example, the bureau sued Capital One in January 2025 for $2 billion, days before President Trump was sworn into office, alleging that Capital One misrepresented the interest rate paid on its savings accounts to customers. That lawsuit was dismissed.
The bureau also sued Early Warning Systems, the company that runs the Zelle money transfer service, in December 2024 for $870 million, alleging that EWS and the banks that operate Zelle were negligent in protecting consumers from fraud and scams. That lawsuit was rejected last year as well.
Also, there was a slowdown in the number of complaints resolved by the office. The CFPB maintains its own consumer complaint database, where a consumer can allege wrongdoing by the bank or financial services company, and the bureau will act as an intermediary between the consumer and the financial company to resolve the complaint. Under the Biden CFPB, about half of all consumer complaints were resolved with ease for the consumer, while under the Trump CFPB, that number dropped to less than 5 percent.
The independent Government Accountability Office released a separate report Monday outlining its attempts to track the Trump administration’s reorganization and restructuring of the CFPB. The GAO said it received no cooperation from the White House or the office, and the GAO must rely largely on public records to draft its report. In a response to the GAO, the CFPB cited ongoing litigation between its employees and management as the primary reason it could not cooperate.
The GAO report largely matches what has been documented in news reports that the bureau has dropped dozens of enforcement actions against alleged wrongdoing, overturned rules and regulations that the bureau’s previous leadership said would protect consumers or bring them financial relief. There have even been rules and regulations enacted during President Trump’s first term that have been targeted by the office’s current leadership.
Mark Paoletta, the office’s legal director and effectively its deputy director under Vought, called the GAO report “biased and flawed” in a letter to the agency that did not raise specific problems with its findings, other than to say the GAO was working with incomplete information.