It is a painful irony that the effort underway by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to hobble and perhaps shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will almost certainly reduce government efficiency, not increase it. Shutting down that agency will immeasurably harm consumers and take the U.S. back to an era before the 2008 financial crisis.

The CFPB was created in the aftermath of that financial crisis and the Great Recession—the worst economic downturn in the United States since the 1930s and the Great Depression. Unemployment doubled, rising from 5 to 10 percent in less than 24 months, home values fell by approximately 30 percent and the real gross domestic product (GDP) dropped 4.3 percent. Experts have attributed the 2008 financial crisis to reduced regulation and oversight of the financial services industry, increased risk-taking by that industry and questionable financial products such as higher risk mortgages, which the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission explained “confound[e]d consumers who didn’t examine the fine print, baffling conscientious borrowers who tried to puzzle out their implications.”

After years of painful losses for consumers and the American economy, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which established the CFPB as the only agency exclusively focused on enforcing federal consumer financial laws and protecting consumers against unfair, deceptive and abusive practices. The CFPB has since returned more than $21 billion to consumers through its supervisory and enforcement work. That’s in addition to other impacts, like the estimated $6.1 billion consumers will save each year as a result of recent bank fee policy changes related to CFPB’s work. Comparatively, between the moment the CFPB opened its doors in 2011 through the end of fiscal year 2024, the CFPB received approximately $7.3 billion from the Federal Reserve to fund its operations. The numbers don’t lie—the return on investment is over two to one, with more than $2 dollars being returned to consumers’ pockets for every $1 that the government spends running the agency. Eliminating such a return is a reduction, not an increase, in government efficiency.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration and DOGE have launched a concerted effort to dismantle and destroy the CFPB despite the important work it has done to protect American consumers. On Monday, February 10, CFPB staff were reportedly instructed to cease work and not report to their offices. An error message went up on the agency’s homepage, and remains there. Termination notices have reportedly been sent to more than one hundred CFPB employees, with potentially more to come. Crypto CEOs as well as some representatives of the fintech and banking industry have suggested that they will be glad to have the CFPB out of their way.

“Anyone actually interested in government efficiency would champion and protect this agency, not impede or shutter it.”

DOGE’s purported motive to maximize governmental efficiency does not appear genuine in the case of the CFPB, because it is hard to deny the value to American consumers of the CFPB and its work. Anyone actually interested in government efficiency would champion and protect this agency, not impede or shutter it. Although many of DOGE’s actions across the government appear harmful, ill-reasoned and legally and ethically questionable, the consequences with respect to CFPB are particularly troubling.

Even industry groups subject to the CFPB’s regulation have conceded the benefits of the CFPB to the financial sector. For example, a representative of the Credit Union trade association recently spoke out about the lack of certainty that will be injected into the regulatory arena without the CFPB. And the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors explained in a 2023 court filing that “[l]enders, servicers, and consumers have operated by the CFPB’s guideposts for more than ten years, and without those rules substantial uncertainty would arise as to how to undertake mortgage transactions in accordance with federal law.”

Efforts to challenge the CFPB’s existence are not unfamiliar to the bureau’s nearly 2,000 dedicated federal employees who work to enforce the law, including last year’s serious challenge to its existence when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the agency after hearing a case challenging whether the agency’s funding structure was constitutional. But despite these threats to its existence, the CFPB has asserted its authority to regulate many lucrative business activities, including regulating financial entities and activities that may have previously been able to escape scrutiny, such as nonbank financial entities like payday lenders. The CFPB has taken action on fees associated with the more than $1.2 trillion in credit card debt Americans owe. And the CFPB has done work to stop data brokers from selling Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information.

The CFPB and its employees have worked to make sure that financial markets are “fair, transparent, and competitive”, prevent discrimination in the consumer financial services marketplace, prevent illegal fees, ensure that Americans aren’t subjected to predatory financial business practices, and that consumers have a place to go when they have a complaint about a financial institution that they need help resolving. Since the agency was formed, it has sent more than 6.8 million consumer complaints to companies for response, and 63 million consumers have gone to the CFPB for help answering financial questions. Until recently, I served as an attorney at the CFPB, proudly working shoulder to shoulder with many of the nonpartisan civil servants whose jobs are now threatened by the Trump administration and DOGE, and I have seen firsthand their commitment to protecting American consumers.

If the administration were actually interested in taking on waste, fraud and abuse, they would be building up the CFPB, the government agency tasked with rooting it out in the financial sector for the sake of consumers, rather than tearing it down. Otherwise, it seems the administration’s efforts to dismantle the CFPB are little more than an attempt to help wealthy corporate interests line their pockets and escape much needed government regulation.

NOTE: At the time of this publication, Jason Powell is the Policy Director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). From 2023 through January 2025, Jason served as the CFPB’s Deputy General Counsel for Oversight.