WASHINGTON — For Senator Elizabeth Warren, the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the latest target of the Trump administration’s campaign to slash the federal bureaucracy — is extremely personal.
The agency was conceived by Warren when she was a Harvard law professor as a financial version of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect Americans from unsafe loans, predatory lenders, and excessive or hidden fees. She publicly championed its merit after the 2007 mortgage meltdown crisis and was instrumental in getting the CFPB into a sweeping 2010 overhaul of financial regulations. Then-President Barack Obama tapped her to build it from scratch.
In effect, Warren created the agency, and it created her as a Democratic political figure. Republican opposition to her potential nomination as its first director in 2011 led Obama to tap someone else, forcing Warren into a backup plan — running for a Massachusetts Senate seat.
Now, after helping stave off multiple attempts over the years by Republicans, bankers, and business groups to kill it, Warren is trying to fight off the biggest threat yet to the CFPB’s existence.
“It’s personal to me when people get cheated. It’s personal to me when someone ends up paying tens of thousands of dollars more on a mortgage because tricks built into the system meant they couldn’t compare prices,” Warren told the Globe Monday, getting emotional as she ticked off other types of financial scams.
“The fact that it has been a pretty damn effective cop on the beat to shut down much of that activity matters,” she continued before she headed to a late-afternoon protest rally outside the agency’s now-shuttered Washington headquarters. “It matters to me. And it should matter to every American who just wants a chance to build a little economic security and not get cheated in the meantime.”
The CFPB says it has provided consumers with more than $21 billion in refunds, canceled debt, and other relief since 2011. Among its regulatory actions in recent years have been limiting bank overdraft fees, capping credit card late fees, and removing medical debt from credit reports.
“Are you ready to fight for the little agency that fights for us?” Warren roared into a handheld microphone to about 300 CFPB employees and their supporters at the end of a fiery 10-minute speech at the rally.
“Are you ready to fight the billionaires who are trying to take over this country? Are you ready to say no to Elon Musk?” she continued, each question answered with shouts of “Yes!” “We will fight it out in Congress. We will fight it out in the courts. We will fight it out across this country. And I promise you, we will win!”
Trump appointed Russell Vought, the newly confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, as acting CFPB director on Friday after firing director Rohit Chopra, a longtime Warren ally, on Feb. 1, a year and a half before his five-year term expired. Vought immediately went to work to try to shut down the agency. He closed its headquarters at least for this week and told employees not to “perform any work tasks,” spurring a legal challenge from the union representing the workers.
“CFPB RIP,” Musk, heading Trump’s so-called government efficiency effort, posted on X Friday next to a gravestone emoji after Vought’s appointment was announced.
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren — has long functioned as another woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy that leverages its power against certain industries and individuals disfavored by so-called ‘elites,’ “ the White House said in a statement Monday.
Republicans have opposed the CFPB from the start, joined by many banking and business groups who have complained it’s too heavy-handed and not accountable to Congress because it is funded by the Federal Reserve outside the normal appropriations process. Republicans have claimed the agency’s funding set-up is unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court rejected that argument last May in a case brought by payday lenders. The agency had about 1,750 employees in 2024.
Vought said on X Saturday that the CFPB had a budget balance of $711.7 million that was “excessive in the current fiscal environment” and he would not be taking the agency’s next scheduled infusion of funding from the Fed. “This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he wrote.
The agency was targeted for elimination in Project 2025, the conservative plan for a second Trump term that Vought helped write. While Warren and about a dozen Democratic lawmakers rallied in support of the CFPB Monday, many congressional Republicans cheered its possible demise.
“A great day for America,” declared Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, a strong Trump supporter. “The agency should never have been created. It was wreaking havoc all over the country.”
But like other agencies targeted by Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency, the CFPB was created by statute and Congress would have to pass a law officially killing it. And trying to shut down the CFPB is a risk for Trump, who campaigned as an economic populist and promised to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent.
If enacted by Congress, the task of policing compliance would fall to the CFPB. Senators Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, and Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced legislation this month to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent for five years. They cited a recent report by Forbes that said the average credit card interest rate was more than 28 percent.
“We note that parts of the MAGA coalition backed the war on junk fees,” Jaret Seiberg, a Washington financial policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen, wrote in a report to its clients. “It is why we still believe this will end up as an effort to curb the agency rather than end it regardless of Vought’s current plan for the CFPB.”
Vought’s actions belie all of Trump’s talk about standing up for the little guy, Warren said.
“Donald Trump’s attack on the CFPB shows just how hollow his promises were during the campaign,” she told the Globe. “Trump campaigned on lowering costs for families ... sidelining the CFPB costs families, sometimes as much as thousands and thousands of dollars.”
Warren noted that opponents of the agency started targeting it when it was still being drafted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
“It’s no surprise that those big banks are still out there hammering to get rid of the agency so they can run their business without any oversight,” she told the Globe. But since the agency has opened, Warren said, another reason has emerged: its success in responding to nearly 7 million consumer complaints and returning money to people.
“The agency has demonstrated every single day of its existence that it is possible to put a cop on the beat to level the playing field and give consumers better choices to make their own decisions without getting tricked and trapped, and that businesses can compete straight up and make a nice profit,” Warren said, sounding some of the same themes she did in advocating for the CFPB’s creation years ago. “That little agency is a ray of optimism in a world that constantly attacks the functioning of government.”
Kendall Wright of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.