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For the first time since the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, its leadership will have to answer questions before Congress. CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought will testify this week before the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee. These hearings give lawmakers a long-overdue opportunity to confront the man who has spent more than a year trying to dismantle one of the federal government’s most important consumer watchdogs. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, the far-right governing blueprint that explicitly called on Congress to abolish the CFPB and urged the president to dissolve it, pull down its rules, and scatter its staff. Once installed as acting director, Vought began carrying out that agenda. He halted critical work, weakened enforcement, targeted expert staff for sweeping layoffs, abandoned consumer protections, and tried to deprive the agency of the people and resources it needs to police Wall Street, predatory lenders, and big tech companies. Four in five voters support the CFPB after hearing about its mission, and 91% believe regulating financial services is important. That includes 87% of Republicans, 88% of independents, and 95% of Democrats. Weakening the CFPB is a Wall Street giveaway. Protecting people from fraud, discrimination, junk fees, and predatory lending is a bipartisan public mandate.
Vought has proposed cutting the CFPB’s total workforce by 68%, its enforcement staff by 80%, and its examination staff by 84%. Those are the investigators, examiners, attorneys, economists, and market experts responsible for uncovering misconduct and identifying emerging financial risks before they spread across the economy. Gutting those teams leaves families exposed and makes the country less prepared for the abuses and regulatory failures that can grow into another financial crisis. Congress created the CFPB after the 2008 financial crisis because fragmented, industry-friendly oversight had failed catastrophically. Since then, the CFPB obtained more than $21 billion in relief for over 200 million people. Vought has spent his tenure reversing that progress and transforming an agency built to hold corporations accountable into one that shields them from accountability. Lawmakers must demand documents, explanations, and a full accounting of who benefited from every enforcement case dropped, every settlement weakened, and every expert pushed out. Let’s expose Vought’s corporate giveaways and rebuild the CFPB’s power to protect people. - Tom. Tom Feltner (he/him)
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