WASHINGTON, DC – With the U.S. Senate today failing to pass an amendment that would have removed cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the big brutal bill (H.R. 1) and moving toward the budget bill’s final passage, the chamber moves closer to cutting the CFPB’s annual funding limit by nearly half. If enacted, the bill would create a funding maximum below what the CFPB spent each year from 2014 through 2024, including under CFPB directors appointed by President Trump in his first term. This cap would force cuts to the CFPB budget to a level below what those directors believed was needed to fulfill the agency’s statutory mission to protect consumers from financial harms. 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.

“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,” said Mike Calhoun, president at the Center for Responsible Lending. “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 Bankong Committee Reconciliation Provisions and CFPB Funding."

###

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