WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the U.S. Senate passed legislation (H.R. 1), nicknamed the big brutal bill, that includes an historic cut to funds available for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – slashing the annual funding limit by nearly half. If enacted, the bill would set a cap on annual funding that is below the amount that CFPB directors appointed by President Trump in his first term requested and spent each year. In other words, this cap would force cuts so deep that the CFPB would have less funding than those directors believed was needed to fulfill the agency’s statutory mission to protect consumers. Meanwhile, the current Trump Administration continues to pursue a purge of CFPB staff and draconian cuts to its budget – far bigger than even those in the Senate’s budget bill – that would reduce the agency’s resources to a small fraction of what is needed to protect consumers.

“The Senate-passed bill would severely hobble this watchdog agency’s ability to protect consumers,” said Mike Calhoun, president at the Center for Responsible Lending. “While stopping a complete defunding of the Consumer Bureau was a victory and the Senate’s proposed ceiling is larger than that in the House-passed budget bill, the Senate’s big brutal bill still signals an intent by this Administration and Congress to significantly abandon the federal government’s obligation to protect consumers from harms in the financial marketplace.”

Calhoun added, “As more and more Americans struggle to stay above water financially and financial predators abound, the folly of those actions should be apparent. American consumers count on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect their wallets from harm. Lowering the Bureau’s budget ceiling by nearly half suggests that many of those consumers are likely to be let down. The Center for Responsible Lending continues to call on both Congress and the Administration to do the right thing and support full funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to allow the agency’s dedicated public servants to do their jobs.”

Background

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has secured over $21 billion in monetary relief to around 200 million consumers, and it has implemented safeguards that have saved consumers billions more and helped prevent a repeat of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

The rewritten provision in the Senate version of the budget bill would reduce the Consumer Bureau’s annual funding cap from 12% to 6.5% of the Federal Reserve System’s 2009 total operating expenses, adjusted for inflation. Under this formula, the FY2025 cap would go from $823 million to around $446 million, which would limit the agency’s expenditures to below what previous Trump-appointed directors Mick Mulvaney and Kathy Kraninger requested and what they spent on an annualized basis – as shown in the chart (“Figure 1”) in the Congressional Research Service report “Senate Banking Committee Reconciliation Provisions and CFPB Funding.”

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Press Contact: Matthew Kravitz matthew.kravitz@responsiblelending.org