The day before Linda Wetzel in 2012 at her pension home in Southport, NC Sloot – a pleasant place where she could open the windows at night and catch an ocean breeze – the bank that made the loan, surprised her with compensation she did not have expected . Mrs. Wetzel searched her mortgage paper and could not make the indictment public anywhere.
Mrs. Wetzel made the payment and then filed an online complaint to the Bureau for Financial Protection of Consumers. The bank quickly opened an investigation and a month later it sent her a check for $ 5,600.
“My first thought was” thank you. ” I was in tears, “she remembered. “That money was a year or two savings on my mortgage. It was my little nestei. “
The reimbursement of Mrs. Wetzel is a small part of the work that the agency made since it in 2011. It has reclaimed $ 21 billion for consumers. It cut red stand costs, reformed the service market of the student loan, transformed mortgage loans and forced banks and money channels to compensate for victims of fraud.
It may no longer be possible to perform that work.
President Trump appointed Russell Vought, who was confirmed the day before to lead the Office of Management and Budget as acting director of the agency. Mr. Voughte was an author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for increasing the federal government that called for considerable changes, including the abolition of the consumer agency.
In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency in chaos. On Saturday he ordered the 1,700 employees of the agency to stop almost all their work and announced plans to close the financing of the office. Then on Sunday he closed the head office of the office for the coming week. Employees who tried to pick up their laptops from the office were rejected, employees said.
The office “has long been a wake and armed desk against non -destroyed industries and individuals,” Mr. Vought wrote on X on Sunday “” This must end. “
Made by the congress in the aftermath of the housing crisis that caused the large recession, the consumer agency became one of the most feared supervisors of Wall Street, with the power to spend new rules – and to punish companies for breaking them – around Mortgages, credit cards, student loans, credit reports and other areas that influence the financial life of millions of Americans.
The actions of the agency made it a lightning rod for criticism from banks and republican legislators – and placed the square in the crucifixes of the Trump government.
The Elon Musk, the billionaire leader of a government efficiency team that created destruction in the federal government, posted “CFPB RIP” on his social media platform X on Friday. A few hours earlier, his employees had gained access to the Consumer Bureau's head office and computer systems.
During the first Trump government, when Republicans controlled both rooms of the congress, legislators failed to collect sufficient voices to abolish the agency. Some have indicated that they would like to try again. Senator Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee who participates in the Senate Bank Committee, called the office a 'Rogue Agency' on the CBS news program 'Face the Nation' on Sunday.
“It was actually a reckless agency that could go much further than every mandate that I think was originally meant,” said Mr. Hagerty. “It's time to insert it.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat van Massachusetts, who fought for the establishment of the agency and who describes itself as his 'mother' on her X -biography, has tried in the last decade to dismantle the consumer agency.
“President Trump campaigned about helping working families, but Russ Vought just told Wall Street that it is open season for swing families,” she said in a written statement on Sunday. “What Vough does is illegal and dangerous, and we will fight back.”
Many of the actions of the agency have directly affected pocket books by Americans. The rules have overhauled the mortgage market and the types of subprime loans that limit the home crisis. The pressure of the agency led to large banks to lower or eliminate their redstanding fees, and a recently completed rule would close most of those reimbursements to $ 5.
The Agency has recently adopted rules to remove medical debt from credit reports and to limit most credit card late costs to $ 8 or less per month, but lawsuits have delayed those rules to take effect.
“It is striking for me that the economic dissatisfaction of people has created the agency for financial protection of consumers and has created the economic dissatisfaction of people Trump” Shayak Sarkar, Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis.
Mr. Trump's team has given priority to attacks on specific agencies – such as US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Bureau – which serves vulnerable population, said Mr. Sarkar, threw “Much federal support and cheers” at agencies such as immigration -Douane and enforcement, which has intensified his immigration performance.
Although the agency cannot be closed without a conference campaign, his director has the power to radically change his approach. During the first term of Mr Trump he named Mick Mulvaney – then the director of the Budget Office Mr. Vought Now Leads – as acting director of the agency. Mr. Mulvaney called the agency a “joke” in “a sick, sad way” and limited his enforcement actions and making work sharp.
The powers of the office are waved like a pendulum. It moved aggressively when Democrats held the White House, but withdrew during the first term of Mr. Trump. Mr. Mulvaney and his successor appointed by Trump, Kathleen Kraninger, brought the agency in a kind of hibernation, rules that a large part of the market for payment daily loans would have wiped out and had taken the enforcement actions of the agency.
But several current employees of the agency, who spoke confidentially for fear of retaliation, said that the command of Mr. Vough extended on Saturday further than what happened during the last Trump administration.
His instruction to “stop all supervision and research activities” caused a certain alarm. While other federal agencies – including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – also supervising banks, the consumer agency is the only supervisor for non -bank providers. Those companies have a large part of the $ 13 trillion mortgage market.
Mr. Voughte also said that he was planning to cut off the financing of the consumer agency, which comes directly from the Federal Reserve, outside the usual process of conference credits. The budget of the Bureau for the 2025 financial year requires around $ 800 million in annual expenditure, and the FED transferred $ 245 million to the agency in January to meet its last request.
Mr. Voughte wrote on X that he had told the Fed that the agency would not take his next financing draw “because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to perform his duties.”
Adam Levitin, a professor of Georgetown's law that specializes in financial regulation, said on Sunday that the orders of Mr. Vought can be illegal. Some of the federal laws that arrange the Consumer Bureau recommend it to supervise specific entities, and that work does not seem discretionary, he said.
The acting director “has the opportunity to seriously bump the CFPB through a bunch of slow bleeding, but he tries to skip all necessary steps and just go for an immediate deadly blow,” said Mr Levitin. “He may not have the legal ability to actually do that, but I am not sure how much that will matter. Much of the way in which the Trump administration deals with regulatory authorities is simply a kind of blitzkrieg -tactics, where an important part creates fear, uncertainty and chaos. “
A rally on Saturday outside the office's head office, organized by its staff union, attracted a few hundred participants. A resident of Maryland, who asked to remember her name for fear of retributing Mr Trump's allies, joined her husband, a federal employee, to support the employees of the agency.
“I don't think people understand what the CFPB is doing,” she said. “The administration said that they close it because of fraud, but the literal task of the agency is to protect people against fraud and junction rates and predatory lenders.”
Mrs. Wetzel, the pensioner who used her reimbursement of $ 5,600 to replace the floors in her new house, said the quick action on her complaint made her empowered.
“It was such a relief to let the government say what the bank was doing wrong, that this is not the rule of law,” she said.
