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the Trump administration took control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog has largely withdrawn from enforcement and regulatory work, changes that consumer advocates and Democrats now estimate have cost Americans at least $19 billion in financial relief.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 Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office on Monday, the authors say the CFPB has harmed consumers by abandoning key consumer protections, stopping the investigation and dismissing a number of lawsuits.
“Trump’s attempt to dismantle the CFPB has cost families billions of dollars over the past 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 bureau needed to be reduced and reined in because it had grown too large and overreached.
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, several 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 cut 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 about half in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. It is unlikely that all those employees will still have their jobs once all the litigation is resolved.
“The CFPB may still be standing still, but it’s essentially on life support,” Chuck Bell, director of the advocacy program at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. Consumer Reports released its own data Monday that comes to similar conclusions as Warren’s office.
A spokeswoman for the CFPB 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 CFPB Biden finalized in 2024 but the Republican-led Congress overturned last year. That would have saved consumers $5 billion a year, according to bureau estimates at the time.
The Bureau 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, 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 fight the case in court.
About another $4 billion in consumer relief came from a series of lawsuits or settlements that were dismissed by the bureau under Acting Director Vought. For example, the bureau sued Capital One in January 2025 for $2 billion, days before President Trump was to be sworn into office, alleging that Capital One misrepresented the interest rate paid on its savings accounts to customers. That case 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 also dismissed last year.
There was also a reduction in the number of complaints resolved by the Bureau as well. The CFPB maintains its own consumer complaint database, where a consumer can allege misconduct by their 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, roughly half of all consumer complaints were resolved with consumer relief, while under the Trump CFPB, that figure dropped to less than 5%.
The independent Government Accountability Office released a separate report Monday outlining its attempts to keep track of the Trump administration’s reorganization and restructuring of the CFPB. The GAO said it received no cooperation from the White House or the bureau, and the GAO had to rely mostly on public records to produce its report. In a response to the GAO, the CFPB cited ongoing litigation between its employees and management as the primary reason why it could not cooperate.
The GAO report largely agrees with what has been documented in news reports that the Bureau has canceled dozens of enforcement actions against alleged wrongdoing, rules and regulations that the previous Bureau management said would protect consumers or bring them financial relief. There were even rules and regulations enacted during President Trump’s first term that were targeted by the current leadership of the Bureau.
Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer and effectively its deputy director under Vought, called the GAO report “biased and flawed” in a letter to the agency that did not raise any specific issues with its conclusions, other than to say that the GAO was working with incomplete information.