More than 185 Democrats in the House and Senate are urging Trump Administration officials to restore the enforcement and supervisory powers of the CFPB.

“The Trump Administration has effectively fired the financial cop on the beat and declared open season for predatory lenders and scam artists working to steal Americans’ money and threaten their financial security,” the Democrats wrote, in a joint letter to Russell Vought, acting director of the CFPB and director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who served as acting director of the bureau for a short period of time.… Continue Reading

Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought has temporarily put a halt to virtually all of the agency’s work.

President Trump designated Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as acting bureau director Friday night. He replaced Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had served as acting CFPB director until Vought’s appointment.… Continue Reading

As we previously blogged about, Acting Director Scott Bessent circulated a message throughout the CFPB on February 3 directing “…all employees, contractors, and other personnel of the Bureau:

  • Not to approve or issue any proposed or final rules or formal or informal guidance.
  • To suspend the effective dates of all final rules that have been issued or published but that have not yet become effective.
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Our podcast show today features John Culhane and Mike Kilgarriff, partners in Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Financial Services group. They discuss what supervision and enforcement will look like under a new acting director/director appointed by President Trump. This episode is a repurposing of the second half of a webinar that was produced on January 6.… Continue Reading

The CFPB and the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts—a group of fifteen securitization trusts that acquire, pool, and securitize student loans—have entered into a proposed final consent judgment that, if approved, would resolve  the CFPB’s allegations that the Trusts unlawfully filed defective debt collection lawsuits to collect on private student loans.… Continue Reading

If there was any doubt about how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) (under current leadership) feels about what it calls “home equity contracts” (also known as shared appreciation agreements, shared equity agreements, home equity investments, among other names) its actions last week make it clear. 

Among the flurry of issuances, enforcement actions and guidance coming out of the CFPB in the lead up to January 20, the bureau took aim at home contracts with i) the issuance of a Consumer Advisory warning consumers about the risks of these types of agreements, ii) the issuance of an Issue Spotlight, which similarly addressed potential risks to homeowners and provided a detailed summary of how these types of products typically work and how their features compare other home equity products, and iii) the filing of an amicus brief in Roberts v.… Continue Reading

Earlier this month, the CFPB issued a report titled Strengthening State-Level Consumer Protection.  The report argues, among other things, that states should “[r]evitalize private enforcement” by promulgating additional UDAAP laws and regulations that permit consumers to file “representational and “organizational” actions against companies because the widespread use of arbitration clauses by companies has “severely constrained consumers’ ability to enforce the law.”… Continue Reading

As the Biden Administration came to a close, the CFPB released a compendium of guidance documents issued by the bureau between October 2021 and January 2025.

“CFPB guidance documents have provided clarification on the best interpretations of the federal consumer financial laws for those tasked with enforcing them, as well as the courts,” Brian Shearer, the bureau’s assistant director in the Office of Planning & Strategy and CFPB General Counsel Seth Frotman, wrote in an introduction to the volume.… Continue Reading

The CFPB is calling on state governments to increase their focus on consumer financial protection laws.

“Enforcing consumer protection law has long been a state-federal partnership in which the states have often taken the lead,” the CFPB said, in a report that includes legislative and regulatory language that states may use.… Continue Reading

In an effort to foster innovation in financial services, the CFPB is reinstituting its programs that allow companies to obtain regulatory safe harbors through no-action letters and sandboxes to test new products and services.

The CFPB had such programs during the first Trump Administration, but the Biden Administration scrapped them, saying that they were ineffective and unfair.… Continue Reading