SALT LAKE CITY — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a watchdog of sorts for consumers, with the government agency aiming to keep institutions and entities like banks, debt collectors, and payday lenders accountable to the people they serve.
President Donald Trump initially said at the start of his second term in office that he wanted to dismantle the agency, but now says they’ll cut two-thirds of their workforce instead.
So how will the agency cuts affect you, the everyday consumer?
“I remember what it was like before we had a CFPB, when we didn’t have a strong cop on the beat making sure that banks didn’t make bad mortgages that would explode on homeowners, making sure that credit card owners didn’t willy nilly slap fees on your credit card account,” said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting for the National Consumer Law Center.
Wu has been a consumer advocate for nearly two decades. Her work as a lawyer with the center has helped fight inequities within our financial systems. But with the Trump administration threatening to cut more than 80 percent of the CFPB workforce, Wu believes it will make the work she and others love to do more difficult.
“We would see all sorts of problems with consumers, for example, having errors on their credit report that they can’t get fixed,” said Wu. “The CFPB received almost 6,000,000 consumer complaints last year and the vast majority of those were actually, almost 5,000,000, were against the big three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.”
“The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, they’re a natural fallback if your complaint was in with the CFPB and you’re like, ‘Wait, now what’s going to happen to my complaint?’ A great alternative is to go ahead and report to the Federal Trade Commission,” explained Katie Hass, director of Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection.
Hass said the CFPB has been a strong partner for local and state agencies fighting consumer wrongdoing. Without them, more falls on the shoulders of other entities like hers, but consumers have other avenues.
“FBI, DOJ, are also places you can report,” said Hass. “You can come and report to the Division of Consumer Protection, you can report to our Department of Insurance in Utah. You can report to the Department of Financial Institutions if this involves banking or credit unions. There’s lots of different agencies.”
Hass shared that the biggest note for consumers is having all documentation gathered so that you’re ready to report to a few different agencies. And don’t discount what reporting locally can do for you.
“If you feel strongly about your case, one of the advantages of reporting local is we tend to deal in big and small cases, whereas the CFPB and the FTC, they’re really looking for interstate harm," she said. "They’re looking for those bigger cases that would have a federal impact because that actor, for example, that maybe you dealt with, is across multiple states.”
