Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB

After the 2008 financial crisis, which was fueled in part by risky and deceptive mortgage lending, the Dodd-Frank Act, signed on July 21, 2010, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opened on July 21, 2011. It gathered consumer protection powers previously scattered among seven agencies. Unusually, it is led by a single Director rather than a commission, and it is funded by transfers from the Federal Reserve rather than by annual appropriations from Congress.

The CFPB writes and enforces rules under federal consumer financial laws covering mortgages, credit cards, student loans, auto loans, payday lending, debt collection, and credit reporting. It supervises large banks and many nonbank lenders, takes consumer complaints, and brings enforcement cases, which by its own count returned more than 20 billion dollars to consumers in its first decade and a half. It also publishes data and educational tools for borrowers.

In Seila Law v. CFPB, on June 29, 2020, the Supreme Court made the Director removable at will by the President, and on May 16, 2024, it upheld the Bureau's funding system by a vote of 7 to 2. In February 2025 the acting Director ordered staff to stop most work, the administration moved to lay off most employees, and Congress overturned several of its rules and cut its funding cap in the July 2025 budget law, while employee unions won court orders slowing the layoffs. In November 2025 the acting Director said the Bureau could no longer draw on the Federal Reserve because the Fed had no combined earnings, but on March 13, 2026, a federal judge ruled that reading unlawful and ordered the Bureau to keep requesting funds, a ruling it appealed in May 2026. Supporters of the cuts said the Bureau was an unaccountable agency that overreached, while critics said dismantling it would leave consumers exposed to the kinds of abuses that preceded the 2008 crisis.