NEW YORK (AP) — A year after the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog has largely withdrawn from enforcement and regulatory efforts, and consumer advocates and Democrats now estimate the changes have cost Americans at least $19 billion in lost economic relief.
The CFPB has harmed consumers by abandoning key consumer protections, delaying investigations and dismissing some lawsuits, its authors said in a report provided to The Associated Press on Monday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office.
“Trump’s attempts to sideline the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cost families billions of dollars in the last year alone,” said Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and one of the bureau’s fiercest defenders in Congress.
The administration and congressional Republicans argue the bureau needs to be downsized and reined in because it has become too large and overreaching.
The administration took over the CFPB in February 2025 after CFPB Director Rohit Chopra resigned under President Joe Biden and White House Budget Director Russell Vought became acting director. Since then, few new investigations have been opened, many employees have been ordered to stop working, and several pending enforcement actions against financial firms 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 the move was blocked by a court. Even if the employee union does prevail in its lawsuit against Vought, Congress will cut the bureau’s budget by roughly half in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act. It’s unlikely that all of these employees will still have their jobs once all the lawsuits are resolved.
“The CFPB may still exist, but it is essentially on life support,” Chuck Bell, director of advocacy programs at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. Consumer Reports released its own data on Monday and reached similar conclusions to Warren’s office.
A CFPB spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
One form of relief consumers were denied, the report said, was limits on overdraft fees that the Biden CFPB finalized in 2024 but that the Republican-led Congress overturned last year. The bureau estimated at the time that this would save consumers $5 billion annually.
The bureau also seeks to limit the amount consumers pay credit card companies when they are late on a bill. This would save Americans approximately $10 billion, according to Bureau estimates 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, decided not to pursue the case in court.
Another roughly $4 billion in consumer relief will come from a series of lawsuits or settlements that were dismissed by the bureau under Acting Director Vought. For example, the bureau sued Capital One for $2 billion in January 2025, days before President Trump was sworn in, alleging that Capital One misrepresented the interest rates it paid customers on savings accounts. The lawsuit was dismissed.
The bureau also sued Early Warning Systems, which operates the money transfer service Zelle, for $870 million in December 2024, accusing EWS and the banks that operate Zelle of being negligent in protecting consumers from fraud and scams. That lawsuit was also dismissed last year.
The bureau also resolved fewer complaints. The CFPB operates its own consumer complaint database, where consumers can allege wrongdoing by their banks or financial services companies, and the bureau will act as an intermediary between consumers and financial companies to resolve complaints. Under the Biden CFPB, about half of consumer complaints were resolved and consumers received relief, while under the Trump CFPB that number has dropped to less than 5%.
The independent Government Accountability Office released a separate report on Monday outlining its efforts to track the Trump administration’s efforts to reorganize and reorganize the CFPB. The GAO said it received no cooperation from the White House or the bureau, which relied primarily on public records to compile its report. In its response to GAO, the CFPB cited ongoing litigation between employees and management as the primary reason for its inability to cooperate.
The GAO report largely matched news reports that the bureau had canceled dozens of enforcement actions against alleged wrongdoers, rolling back rules and regulations that bureau management had said would protect consumers or bring them financial relief. Even rules and regulations enacted during President Trump’s first term have been targeted by the bureau’s current management.
Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer and de facto deputy director under Vought, called the GAO report “biased and flawed” in a letter to the agency, without raising any specific questions about its conclusions other than to say the GAO was dealing with incomplete information.
