For nearly six months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 1,500 or so staffers have been locked out of their offices and agency computers, while attorneys and judges deliberate over the degree to which Trump’s wrecking crew is legally allowed to assassinate the Bureau, and the degree to which mere judges are legally allowed to stand in the way of a unitary executive hell-bent on breaking the law. The vast amount of supervision, enforcement, reporting, and other activities, some of them essential to economic functioning in consumer markets, has simply gone undone. The depths to which the agency is inactive has not really sunk in. CFPB employees who spoke to the Prospect anonymously due to fear of retaliation highlighted the dire situation at the agency, which has helped secure $21 billion in relief for millions of wronged consumers since it got off the ground in 2011. CFPB headquarters is shuttered entirely; one staffer had to retrieve their belongings off the loading dock, so eager was the current leadership to dismantle the place. Remote workers do not have the ability to view files without authorization, and have been told either directly or indirectly to stop working. “I literally have not had any work whatsoever,” one staffer told the Prospect. “There is no precedent for it.” Practically the only people at the CFPB doing anything are the ones working to drop prior enforcement actions and cancel proposed rules. More from Maureen Tkacik | James Baratta Leadership has tried to fire nearly all the employees twice, blocked both times by a court case that is still under review. The Supreme Court’s green light to the Trump administration to attempt mass reductions in force (RIFs) could serve as the final blow for an agency with the singular mission of protecting consumers from being scammed. “They just want to take a hacksaw to the agency,” Allison Preiss, senior fellow at the Student Borrower Protection Center and a former CFPB official, told the Prospect. “It’s all moving toward [the] goal of an agency that exists in name only.” In the meantime, formal entries into the CFPB’s consumer complaints database have soared, suggesting that the business of junk fees, predatory terms, and routine swindles is booming just as loudly as the Prospect has been predicting it would since Elon Musk memorably typed out “CFPB RIP” on X. All told, 2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011, with reports of everything from being shut out of bank accounts after a hurricane to scammers impersonating ICE officials who convince consumers to buy them gift cards in order to help them avoid deportation. The preponderance of these complaints concern the three main data brokers that issue consumer credit scores, which charge lenders as much as $60 per pull for credit reports on consumers that are often riddled with inaccuracies and obsolete data. Two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the CFPB sued Experian over the practice at the heart of that glut of complaints: When a consumer calls or emails to report fraudulent or outdated information on his or her credit report, company representatives essentially solicit a boilerplate assurance that the consumer is lying from whoever originally furnished the information, generally ignoring and almost always failing to share any of the evidence or documentation supplied by the consumer, and then close the case without giving any consideration to the notion that the consumer might be telling the truth. Practically the only people at the CFPB doing anything are the ones working to drop prior enforcement actions and cancel proposed rules. The CFPB under director Rohit Chopra claimed these “sham investigations” constituted a flagrant violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970. But under Trump’s interim CFPB chief, Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, the administration seems to have found in the Experian method a new role model for pseudo-governance: It will keep its 1-800 number and the database it uses to track consumer complaints, both of which the agency is explicitly required to do under the 2010 statute that created it. But it wants to send the complaints themselves into a black hole, shielded from future customers at the offending firms. Regulatory agencies constantly issue rules interpreting and clarifying how laws will be carried out, and among the dozens of CFPB rules that Vought has retracted was the one requiring the agency to publish consumer complaint data, along with the substance of each individual complaint, on its website. The website would not exist at all if not for the federal judge who ordered Vought to restore it in compliance with the Dodd-Frank Act that established the CFPB in 2010. Back in February when Vought originally set loose the DOGE boys upon the agency—one of whom, it would later turn out, owns more than three quarters of a million dollars worth of stock in various CFPB-regulated companies and products—all that appeared at consumerfinance.gov was a 404 error message. Staffers were temporarily called back from involuntary leave to restore the site’s primary function after a federal judge ordered Vought to comply with the statute. No one expects the site to last much longer in its current form. “Keeping the complaints database public-facing is critical for public accountability, and will help state regulators and the public continue to keep an eye out for patterns of misconduct and abuse,” Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel for consumer protection and financial services at Americans for Financial Reform, told the Prospect. Vought’s efforts to delete the CFPB have been wide-ranging. Beyond consumer complaints, the nonbinding policy directives he has scrapped include two consumer financial protections crafted to curb excessive credit card late fees and remove medical debt from credit reports, respectively. The agency under Vought’s leadership also vacated a proposed rule to rein in data brokers by redefining them as consumer reporting agencies, and withdrew a proposed interpretive rule that would have established a framework to regulate emerging digital payment mechanisms, including cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. According to Zinner, rolling back these protections “will expose everyday people to more scams.” “Every legal loophole that the previous administration tried to close is now open again,” she told the Prospect. “With no meaningful oversight and accountability, there is no safety in the financial marketplace. People are on their own now.” THE PLOT TO DISMANTLE THE CFPB is as old as the agency itself, and Vought, a self-professed Christian nationalist, has long been at its center. When Dodd-Frank passed, Democrats had large majorities in the House and Senate, banks had foreclosed on millions of homes since the start of the financial crisis, and Vought had just abandoned his Hill job at the Republican Study Committee for a Heritage Foundation post. But predatory lenders and their allies in Washington never stopped trying to damage the agency with a flotilla of lawsuits: trying to alter its structure to a five-member commission, enabling the president to fire the director at will, even trying to change its name to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, mostly out of spite. Above all, Congress wanted to gain control over CFPB funding, which Dodd-Frank structured to come from the Federal Reserve, in a bid to insulate the mission to protect consumers from politics. The giant Republican budget bill originally capped the amount the CFPB could draw from the Fed at $0; the parliamentarian vetoed this effort, but agreed to instead allow the funding cap to decrease by almost half, from 12 percent of the Fed’s total operating expenses to 6.5 percent. From his perch at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a think tank he founded with help from a conservative think tank incubator helmed by former Tea Party senator (and O.G. CFPB repealist) Jim DeMint, Vought concocted a more dramatic option for achieving the same outcome: “impoundment,” or cutting off funding entirely, in violation of all laws and norms and precedents. At CRA, Vought was building a team of radical legal scholars designed to serve as a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to the next conservative president. They believed the anti-impoundment laws of 1974 unconstitutionally violated the president’s right to defund whatever government agencies he disliked. CRA staffers Mark Paoletta and Daniel Shapiro wrote a paper arguing this just two months before the election. In late November, CRA staffers Jeff Clark and Anthony Licata published a paper advancing another radical notion: that presidents had the absolute right to fire whomever they wanted, regardless of what civil service protections, Humphrey’s Executor, and labor unions had to say about it. By February, all four of those men would be working at the CFPB. Vought’s CFPB has permanently dismissed 22 public enforcement actions against companies and institutions accused of ripping off consumers to the tune of billions of dollars. The week that followed Elon Musk’s tombstone emoji tweet was horrific but, at least, invigorating. On Friday night, DOGE shut off all vendor contracts and shut down the website, though they accomplished it through a shortcut that did not involve accessing the content management system, salvaging most of the agency’s data. Vought informed Fed chair Jerome Powell he wouldn’t be needing the next quarter’s Fed allocation, asked a deputy to commence returning the agency’s $124 million unallocated Civil Penalty Fund balance to the Treasury Department, and ordered a small crew of incredulous operations staffers to prepare pink slips for roughly 1,400 permanent employees of the regulator’s 1,700-odd employees. The imminently downsized staffers’ labor union retained a legal team, which pulled DOGE-style all-nighters making the case to get a temporary restraining order to preserve jobs and agency data. A hearing was scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday, Valentine’s Day; one staffer got a frantic email at 1:36 p.m. ordering her to send out the pink slips within the next 24 minutes before the judge could grant a temporary restraining order. Once the judge froze the head count reductions and suspended the dissolution of the Bureau, Vought put his CRA legal scholars on the job of a surgical cleanup task. Paoletta joined the agency as its full-time chief legal officer, bringing with him Shapiro as his deputy, Clark as a senior adviser, and Licata as a consultant. Their first assignment involved combing through the list of canceled contracts and pink slips and identifying, one by one, which of them were absolutely, nonnegotiably necessary to comply with the law. They activated a few employees to parse the list of vendors, then another group to “conduct an assessment of system backlogs,” and another to start work on the statutorily required annual report to Congress, and the first week of March, the team that had dealt with consumer response and education was activated to get the database up and running. But the breadwinners of the CFPB, the supervision and enforcement staffers who monitor the financial product landscape and have proven some of the most efficient civil attorneys in Washington when judged by the $21 billion they have returned to defrauded customers, remained shut out. For Vought, who has frequently spoken to donors and fellow ideologues about his desire to “traumatize” government workers, humiliating the CFPB enforcement team has been anything but a thoughtless venture. Vought’s CFPB has permanently dismissed 22 public enforcement actions against companies and institutions accused of ripping off consumers to the tune of billions of dollars, per a recent analysis released by the Student Borrower Protection Center and Consumer Federation of America. There are a few exceptions, though: Enforcement attorneys got their access to agency systems “reactivated” for a day or two just so they could prepare motions asking judges to dismiss their cases. Enforcement attorney Stephen Jacques was reactivated to dismiss a blockbuster complaint the Bureau had filed just four months earlier against the parent company of Zelle, the payment platform seven mega-banks had rushed into service to compete with Venmo and Cash App that had almost instantaneously become infested with fraud. Francesca Bartolomey was reactivated to dismiss a case she had helped to prepare last spring against a predatory Rent-A-Center subsidiary for using deceptive language and terms to conceal the 200 percent markups it charges on the furniture and household goods it sells. The destruction of the CFPB has proven so successful that Vought got an extended lease to continue the job. Jonathan McKernan, a former member of the FDIC board of directors, was nominated to serve as a permanent confirmed director of the agency, but in May, President Trump withdrew McKernan’s name and nominated him for a top Treasury Department position. No replacement has been announced. Last month, Cara Petersen, the Bureau’s acting chief of enforcement, who had been at the CFPB since its establishment and gone to great lengths to appear cooperative throughout the “transition” after her predecessor quit in February, finally sent the inevitable “I quit” email to Vought and her agency colleagues: “It has been devastating to see the bureau’s enforcement function being dismantled through thoughtless reductions in staff, inexplicable dismissals of cases, and terminations of negotiated settlements that let wrongdoers off the hook,” Petersen wrote. LAST YEAR, THE AGENCY SENT OUT $1.8 billion worth of checks to defrauded customers—more money than the Department of Justice collected all year from every health care fraudster it litigated combined—to some 4.3 million victims of two scammy credit repair services, many of which arrived just in time for Christmas. The ability to force financial scammers to return ill-gotten gains to millions of customers is an awesome authority in a political system that makes it so difficult to materially improve people’s lives, so Vought has unsurprisingly dedicated special effort to destroying that power. There are still signs Vought’s deregulatory junta remains somewhat conflicted about exactly what parts of the agency they want to defenestrate and what they merely seek to “renew.” Back in April, for example, Paoletta issued a memo on the agency’s slimmed-down priorities that, above nearly everything else, highlighted securing restitution for scams against service members and focusing enforcement efforts on traditional depository institutions, while moving away entirely from student loans, neobanks, and fintech. But just last week, Vought personally withdrew a consent order against Navy Federal Credit Union that would have forced the institution to repay $80 million in illegal overdraft fees the bank had charged on ATM transactions it had informed depositors they had sufficient funds to cover. And two weeks before that, the agency filed a motion in the bankruptcy of the neobank Synapse suggesting it would contemplate using the fund to bail out screwed-over customers of the Andreessen Horowitz–backed fintech. Perhaps Marc Andreessen, who spent the 2024 campaign season slandering the agency on the podcast circuit, called in a favor? Whatever the case, the agency scrambled to claw back millions of dollars earmarked for fraud victims so big banks might add a penny or two to their earnings per share. “It’s a mind-blowingly stupid thing to do,” a CFPB employee told the Prospect. “There’s lots of financial scams already out there and they’re just going to proliferate.” Preiss, former senior adviser to the director of the CFPB during the Biden administration, resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s “aggressive actions to sideline” the agency earlier this year. She said the sprawling attempts to gut the CFPB (chronicled extensively by our colleague David Dayen) have forced the agency to deprioritize important issues and abandon its efforts to hold unscrupulous companies accountable. It’s lost on no one that much of the agency’s staff is at imminent risk of falling into the financial precarity that dubious credit repair services, payday lenders, overdraft-gouging banks, and other financial scammers prey upon, especially given the administration’s seeming desire to punish recipients of Biden-era student debt forgiveness programs. While probationary employees were laid off in February, most of the agency’s staff remains on paid leave only until the appeals court makes its decision in the case. The court can either uphold the injunction and send the case back to the lower court to litigate a more permanent solution—in which case Vought will almost unquestionably appeal to the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly ruled for whatever the Trump administration wishes—or overturn the injunction and pave the way for mass firings, which will likely commence within hours of a decision. The latter is the likelier scenario: Two of the three judges on the panel hearing the case are Trump appointees, after all, and both clerked for Clarence Thomas, who counts among his closest nonbillionaire friends one Mark Paoletta, the former Center for Renewing America senior fellow who currently serves as the chief legal officer of Vought’s CFPB. In the interim, CFPB employees are “counting the days until the other shoe drops.”