Warren Leads 40 Senators Pressing Administration on Impact of Mass CFPB Firings for Consumers Scammed by Big Corporations; Government Watchdog Takes Up Warren, Kim Call to Investigate
GAO to investigate Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Warren leads 40 Senators in letter to Vought pressing for answers on more than 80 congressionally mandated functions of the CFPB
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, led 40 Democratic Senators in a letter to CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought outlining more than 80 congressionally mandated functions of the CFPB and pressing for answers on how the agency would be able to fulfill them after firing almost the entire staff. Signers of the letter include every Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.
Also new today, legislative watchdog agency the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is taking up the call from Senators Andy Kim (D-NJ) and Warren to investigate the Trump Administration’s actions to dismantle the agency, including attempted firings, stop-work orders, and recent announcements of dropped lawsuits to hold big corporations responsible for ripping off Americans. The GAO will investigate whether the CFPB is able to fulfill its congressionally mandated functions.
In today’s letter to Vought, the Senators wrote: “On April 17, you tried to fire nearly all of the agency’s remaining 1,700 employees—the staff responsible for fulfilling the CFPB’s mission and statutory requirements to prevent Americans from getting scammed by big banks and giant corporations. Your hasty and unjustified mass firings are an illegal shutdown of the CFPB that will leave it unable to conduct agency actions that are required by law.”
The Senators continued: “You directed the gutting of entire divisions—including departments created by Congress to protect servicemembers and older Americans—attempting to leave a shell of only 200 employees to supervise and examine large financial institutions across the country, respond to millions of consumer complaints, answer the phone for hundreds of thousands of people seeking help, monitor emergency financial risks, and run all of the agency’s other operations.”
The Senators laid out in detail the impact the mass layoffs would have on specific functions of the CFPB––including firing all but one employee helping victims of scams in the offices focused on our nation’s two million servicemembers and tens of millions of older Americans.
The Senators concluded: “We request that you provide—by May 7, 2025—a detailed accounting of each of the more than 80 statutory obligations of the CFPB, the number of employees assigned to each of those functions as of December 2024, the number of employees who would be assigned to each function if your rushed reduction in force were to go into effect, the immediate impact of such a reduction on the agency’s ability to perform each function consistent with federal law and federal court orders, and copies of any individualized or particularized analysis of those planned reductions on the agency’s work.”
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