A day before Linda Vitzel South Port closed at her retirement home in South Port in 2012 – a comfortable place where she could open windows at night and catch sea air – the bank surprised that debt I put it on which he didn’t expect. . Ms Vitzel hollowed out her mortgage paperwork and could not be disclosed anywhere.
Ms. Vetzell paid and then Filed an online complaint With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bank started investigating quickly, and a month later, he sent him a check of 5,600.
“My first thought was ‘thanks’. I was in tears,” he remembered. “This money was saving my mortgage for a year or two years. It was my little nest egg.
Ms Vitzel’s refund is a small piece of bureau work since it was created in 2011. It has made $ 21 billion for consumers. These Reduce over draft feesStudents Loan Services Market Reforms, mortgage loan rules and forced banks and money transmitters were replaced to compensate for fraudsters.
It may now be done to do this work.
President Trump appointed Russell vote on Friday, which was confirmed a day earlier to lead the Office of Management and Budget, as the acting director of the agency. Mr. Vote Project was the author of 2025, a conservative map to promote the federal government, calling for significant changes, including the elimination of consumer bureau.
In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vote threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered 1,700 employees of the bureau to stop all its work and announced plans to reduce the agency’s financing. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Employees said workers who tried to retrieve their laptop from the office.
“The bureau has long been a awakened and weapons -powered agency against unwanted industries and individuals.”
Created by the Congress as a result of a housing crisis, which eliminated a major recession, became one of the most frightened regulators of the Consumer Bureau Wall Street, which had the option of issuing new rules – and companies Companies were fined for breaking. Students’ loans, credit reporting and other sectors that affect the financial life of millions of Americans.
The bureau’s actions made it an electric stick to criticize banks and Republican lawmakers – and put it in the cross hair of the Trump administration.
The enemies of the agency have long demanded an end to it, which is only the authority to do to the Congress. Elon Musk, a billionaire leader of a government performance team publishing “CFPB RIP” on his social media platform X on Friday, posted “CFPB RIP”. A few hours ago, his colleagues had access to the user bureau’s headquarters and computer systems.
During the first Trump administration, when the Republicans controlled both the Houses of the Congress, they failed to collect enough votes to abolish the legislative agency. Some have indicated that they would like to try again. Senator Bill Hughes, who is Tennessee who is serving in the Senate Banking Committee, The bureau is called the “bullying agency” “Face the nation” at the CBS News program on Sunday.
“It has been basically a carefree agency that has been allowed to move beyond any mandate, which I think was actually intended,” said Mr Hagrey. “It’s time to restrain it.”
Massachusetts’ Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, who struggled for the creation of the agency and who describes himself as his “mother” on his Xi biography, made just in the last decade to end the user bureau. Is
In a written statement on Sunday, “President Trump campaigned to help working families, but Russia votes only told Wall Street that it was an open weather for families to scam.” “What is doing is illegal and dangerous, and we will fight.”
Many of the agency’s actions have directly affected the American pocket books. Its rules restored the mortgage market, in which the type of sub -prime loan that ends the housing crisis. The pressure from the bureau caused major banks to reduce or eliminate their over draft fees, and the recently finalized rule will take most of these fees to $ 5.
The agency recently adopted rules to remove medical loans from credit reports and limit most credit card fees per month to $ 8 or less, but legal proceedings affect these rules. Delayed from being.
“It’s surprising to me that people’s economic dissatisfaction gave rise to the consumer financial protection bureau, and people’s economic dissatisfaction gave birth to Trump.“” Shake Sarkar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, said.
Mr Trump’s team has preferred attacks on specific agencies – such as the US Agency for International Development and Consumer Bureau – who serve the weak population, said Mr Sarkar said, and in agencies like immigration customs “many federal support and help. Happiness “throwing. And the implementation, which has accelerated the immigration crackdown.
Although the bureau cannot be closed without the Congress action, his director has the authority to change his point of view altogether. During Mr Trump’s first term, he appointed Mr Mulwani – the then Budget Office Director, Mr Voting as acting director of the Bureau. Mr Mulwani described the agency as a “joke” in a “sick, sad way” and stopped its implementation measures and governance work.
The agency’s powers are swinging like a pendant. This aggressively moved when the Democrats held the White House, but withdrew during Mr Trump’s first term. Mr Mulwani and his Trump’s appointed successor, Kathleen Crannagar, put the bureau into a kind of hydration, which would take advantage of the rules, which would eliminate most of the salary market lending market and implement the bureau. The operations were abolished.
But several employees of the current agency, who secretly spoke of fear of changing, said that on Saturday, Mr. Wayt’s order moved ahead of the events that took place during the last Trump administration.
His guidance for “eliminating all the activity of surveillance and examinations” caused special alarms. While other federal agencies – including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve and the Currency Controller’s Office – also monitor banks, the user bureau is the only regulator for non -bank lenders. Those companies have a large part of the 13 trillion mortgage market.
Mr.Weit also said that he intends to eliminate the consumer bureau’s financing, which comes directly from the Federal Reserve, beyond the usual Congress process. The agency’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year demanded about $ 800 million in annual spending, and the Fed transferred $ 245 million to the bureau in January to meet its latest application.
Mr Weyot wrote on X that he had told the Fed that the bureau would not draw its next funding “because performing his duties is not ‘reasonably necessary’.”
Georgetown Professor Adam Levitin, who specializes in the financial rule, said on Sunday that Mr. Voting orders could be illegal. He said that some federal laws that rule over the consumer bureau ordered it to monitor specific institutions, and that the work did not appear to be discretion.
Mr Levitin said, “The acting director is capable of seriously upset CFPB through a group of slow bloodshed, but he is trying to give up all the necessary steps and only the immediate shock of death. Trying to go. ” “He may not really have the legal ability to do so, but I am not sure how much difference it does. There is a tactic, where a key component is creating fear, uncertainty and chaos.
A Rally on Saturday Outside the bureau’s headquarters, which is organized by its staff union, attracted a few hundred participants. A Maryland resident, who asked for his name to be prevented from taking revenge from Mr Trump’s allies, participated in his husband, a federal worker, to help the agency’s employees.
“I don’t think people think what CFPB does,” he said. “The administration said they were shutting it down because of fraud, but the literal work of the bureau is to protect people from fraud and trash fees and predators.”
Ms. Weitzel, who is a retired, who used her $ 5,600 return to replace the floors in her new home, said her immediate action on her complaint felt empowered.
He said, “The government was very relieved, saying that the bank was wrong, that it was not the rule of law.”
