Trump Names Russell Vought Acting Director Of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Bureau Stops Protecting Consumers Same Afternoon
WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Monday named Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought as Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency established by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from predatory lending and which Mr. Vought has spent the preceding decade publicly planning to abolish.
Within hours of his appointment, Mr. Vought ordered the bureau's roughly 1,700 employees to cease all enforcement actions, supervision activities, examinations of financial institutions, and rulemaking; instructed staff via email not to come to work; and shuttered the bureau's Washington headquarters, an administrative action that elevated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in the eyes of supporters, to one of the most operationally efficient federal agencies in the city, as it now did nothing.
"For too long, hardworking American families have been burdened by a federal bureaucracy that interferes between them and the financial products they need," Mr. Vought said in a statement, identifying the roughly $20 billion the bureau had returned to defrauded consumers since 2011 as exactly the sort of overreach his appointment was intended to end. Asked by reporters whether shuttering a congressionally created agency was an appropriate use of acting-director authority, a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official preferred not to be on the record endorsing the elimination of a congressionally created agency, said the President's view was that if Congress objected to having one of its agencies closed by executive fiat, Congress was free to vote, which it would not.
The decision was greeted enthusiastically by the financial services industry, whose member institutions, including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, had collectively paid more than $13 billion in CFPB penalties over the preceding decade for practices that included opening accounts in customers' names without their knowledge, charging fees for services never rendered, and discriminating against minority borrowers. Elon Musk, whose social media platform X had recently announced plans to operate as a money transmitter and whose ventures would have fallen under bureau jurisdiction, posted "CFPB RIP" within hours of the announcement, an epitaph the bureau itself was no longer staffed to dispute.
Constitutional scholars noted with interest that Mr. Vought, principal author of Project 2025's chapter on the Office of Management and Budget, had described in that document a detailed plan to use the OMB to dismantle independent federal agencies, and was now using the OMB to dismantle an independent federal agency, a degree of policy consistency they characterized as unusual in Washington and especially unusual in light of the President's repeated campaign-trail insistence that he had never heard of Project 2025.
At press time, payday lenders, auto title lenders, and buy-now-pay-later companies were holding a small private celebration at a venue not subject to any operating federal consumer protection authority.