36 hours after Russell Vought took over the consumer agency, he closed his operations

The day before Linda Wetzel closed her retirement home in Southport, NC, in 2012 – a cozy place where she could open the windows at night and catch a sea breeze – the bank that made the loan surprised her with a fee she did not expect. Ms. Wetzel shed his mortgage loan and could not find the described charge everywhere.

Ms. Wetzel made the payment and then filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bank quickly opened an investigation and a month later it sent her a $ 5,600 check.

“My first thought was ‘thank you.’ I was in tears, ”she remembered. “This money was a year or two of savings on my priority loan. It was my little nesting egg. “

Ms. Wetzel’s refund is a small piece of the work that the agency has been doing since it was created in 2011. It has itched $ 21 billion for consumers. The Slashed cover feesReformed Student Loan Service Market, transformed rules for mortgage lending and forced banks and money transfers to compensate for victims of fraud.

It may no longer be able to do this work.

President Trump appointed Friday Russell Vought, who was confirmed a day earlier to lead the office of management and budget, as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Vought was the author of Project 2025, a conservative plan to increase the federal government that called for significant changes, including the abolition of the consumer agency.

In less than 36 hours, Mr. The Vought Agency in Kaos. On Saturday, he ordered the agency’s 1,700 employees to stop almost all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday he closed the agency’s headquarters in the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were rejected, employees said.

The Bureau “Has been a woke up and the weapon agency against unfavorable industries and individuals for a long time,” Mr. Vought Sunday On X. “This must end.”

Created by Congress in the wake of the Housing Crisis, which set the great recession, the consumer agency became student loans, credit reporting and other areas affecting economic lives for millions of Americans.

The actions of the Bureau made it a lightning rod for criticism from banks and Republican lawmakers – and put it square in the Trump Administration’s cross -hair.

The Agency’s enemies have long called for its elimination, which only Congress has the power to do. Elon Musk, billionaire leader of a government -efficiency team that has caused destruction throughout the federal government, published “CFPB RIP” on his social media platform x Friday. A few hours earlier, his employees had accessed the consumer agency’s headquarters and computer systems.

The National Treasury Employee Association, which represents Bureau’s employees, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Vought Sunday night. Assigning Mr. Musk’s team access to employee registries violated the Privacy Act, where the 1974 legislation regulates how the government handles individuals’ personal information, the union said in its complaint filed by Federal Court in Washington.

Agency workers fear that their employment data could be used for harassment online or “to blackmail, threaten or scare them,” the complaint said. Workers are also concerned about the transfer of their personal health or financial details, the union added.

The Union filed another lawsuit against the acting director about his efforts to freeze the agency’s work. Mr. Vought’s orders illegally violate, the union said at the “Congress authority to put and finance the missions” for the consumer agency.

Representatives of the consumer agency and the budget office did not respond to requests for comment.

During the first Trump administration, when Republicans checked both congress for the same, legislators failed to gather enough votes to abolish the agency. Some have stated that they would like to try again. Senator Bill Hagty, a Tennessee -Republican earning in the Senate Bank Committee, called the agency a “Rogue Agency” On Sunday on the CBS News program “Facing the Nation.”

“It has basically been a reckless agency that has been allowed to go far beyond any mandate that I think was originally intended for,” Mr. HAGERTY. “It’s time to empty it in.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who fought for the agency’s creation, and who describes himself as his “mother” on his X biography, has spent the last decade fighting attempts to dismantle the consumer agency.

“President Trump struggled to help working families, but Russ Vought just told Wall Street that it’s open season for scam families,” she said on Sunday in a written statement. “What Vought is doing is illegal and dangerous and we will fight back.”

Many of the Agency’s actions have directly affected the pocketbooks of Americans. Its rules reviewed the mortgage market and slowed down the kind of subprime loans that set up the housing crisis. The pressure from the agency led to large banks reducing or eliminating their cover fees, and a recently completed rule would cover most of these fees for $ 5.

The Agency recently adopted rules to eliminate medical debt from credit reports and limit most credit card late fees to $ 8 or less per day. Month, but litigation has delayed these rules from taking effect.

“It is striking to me that people’s financial dissatisfaction created the consumer’s financial protection agency and people’s financial dissatisfaction created Trump” said Shayak Sarkar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.

Mr. Trump’s team has prioritized attacks on specific agencies – such as the US Agency for International Development and Consumer Office and enforcement that has intensified its immigration crashes.

While the agency cannot be closed without congressional action, its director has the power to radically change its approach. Under Mr. Trump’s first period he appointed Mick Mulvaney – when the director of the budget office is leading Mr. Vought now – as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Mulvaney called the agency a “joke” in “a sick, sad kind of way” and sharply limited its enforcement actions and regularly doing work.

The powers of the agency have swung like a pendulum. It moved aggressively as the Democrats held the White House, but withdrew under Mr. Trump’s first period. Mr. Mulvaney and his Trump-appointed successor, Kathleen Kranings, put the agency in a kind of hibernation, extinguishing rules that would have wiped out much of the market for payday and cut the agency’s enforcement measures.

But several current agency employees who spoke confidentially for fear of retaliation, Mr. Vought’s order on Saturday extended beyond what happened during the last Trump administration.

His instruction to “cease all supervision and exam activity” caused special alarm. While other federal agencies – including Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – also oversee banks, the consumer agency is the only regulator of non -bank providers. These companies have a large proportion of the market for $ 13 trillion priority loans.

Mr. Vought also said he intended to cut off the consumer agency’s funding, which comes directly from the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional processing process. The agency’s budget for the 2025 financial year requires around $ 800 million in annual expenses, and Fed transferred $ 245 million to the agency in January to meet its latest request.

Mr. Vought wrote on X that he had told Fed that the agency would not take his next financing drawing “because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to perform his duties.”

Adam Levitin, a professor of Georgetown Law, who specializes in financial regulation, said Sunday that Mr. Vought’s orders may be illegal. Some of the federal laws that control the consumer agency order it to supervise specific units, and that work does not appear to be discretionary, he said.

The acting director “has the ability to seriously hobby CFPB through a lot of slow bleeding, but he tries to skip all the necessary steps and just go for an immediate death beat,” Mr. Levitin. “He may not have the legal ability to actually do it, but I’m not sure how much it will do something. Much of the way the Trump administration has dealt with regulatory agencies is just a kind of Blitzkrieg tactic where a key component creates fear, uncertainty and chaos. “

ONE Rally Saturday Outside the bureau’s headquarters, organized by its staff union, a few hundred participants drew. A resident of Maryland who asked for her name to be detained by fear of retaliation from Mr. Trump’s allies, with her husband, participated in a federal worker, to support the agency’s employees.

“I don’t think people understand what CFPB is doing,” she said. “The administration said they close it because of fraud, but the agency’s literal job is to protect people from fraud and unwanted fees and predators lenders.”

Ms. Wetzel, the pensioner who used her $ 5,600 refund to replace floors in her new home, said the quick action on her complaint made her feel empowered.

“It was such a relief to have the government to say what the bank did was wrong that this is not the rule of law,” she said.