COLUMBUS, Ohio — The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)’s future is uncertain as President Trump’s administration attempts to weaken and potentially shut it down.
There are legal battles over whether he and Elon Musk, the tech executive he appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have the authority to shut down the agency, which Congress established.
The first leader of that bureau expressed concern and alarm over what the Trump administration is currently doing with his former bureau.
“They are moving through the federal government with a wrecking ball without much thought, without figuring out how things fit together, just to see what the reaction is,” said Richard Cordray, a former Ohio treasurer and attorney general who ran for governor against Mike DeWine in 2018.
Cordray, who became the CFPB’s first director in 2013, believes it is critical to remember why the agency was established in the first place.
He explained that it was established following the 2008 mortgage crisis, which brought down the country’s economy and caused millions of people to lose their homes and jobs.
“The CFPB was put in place to stabilise the mortgage market, to make it stable and more effective and safe for people to borrow and buy homes and to put in other protections for us and our families against financial companies being able to rip us off and cheat us without any financial consequences,” according to Cordray.
Cordray stated that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has saved consumers billions of dollars and that shutting it down would be a mistake.
“It would be terrible for consumers because it would remove all of the protections that have been put into place that have gotten all of the money back for people; $21 billion that was wrongfully taken from them over the last 15 years by a series of different acts by financial companies that were rectified because of the work of the consumer bureau,” indicated Cordray.
But Cordray believes the CFPB will survive and be around in four years because repealing it would require an act of Congress, which he does not believe Washington lawmakers will do.
Cordray has declined to say whether he intends to run for elected office again in Ohio.
