Where Does The CFPB Go From Here?

Jason Brown and David Silberman

In 2010, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Drawing upon a proposal that then-Professor Elizabeth Warren had put forward several years earlier as the mortgage crisis was beginning to unfold, Congress sought to centralize in a single agency responsibilities that up to that point had been fragmented among multiple federal agencies. As the Treasury Department explained in presenting the blueprint that became the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA), creating a federal consumer financial protection agency would “give consumer protection an independent seat at the table in our financial regulatory system.” Looking back at the lapses in the supervision of the subprime mortgage market leading up to the financial crisis, the Treasury blueprint asserted, “A single agency … could have acted much more quickly and potentially saved many more consumers, communities, and institutions from significant losses.”

Yet from the outset, the CFPB has been a source of controversy and subject to scathing criticism across the political spectrum. Congressman Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) called the very existence of the CFPB “a joke…in a sick, sad kind of way”—and was subsequently named its acting director. His successor was accused by then-Chair of the House Financial Services Committee Maxine Waters (D-CA) of “sabotage” and “betrayal” in the way she carried out her responsibilities.

Over the past 15+ months that controversy has intensified even further. Elon Musk tweeted shortly after the second Trump inauguration, “CFPB RIP,” beginning a drama, played out largely in courtrooms, over whether the administration can drastically shrink or even eliminate the agency. Meanwhile, staff have been barred from entering their office, work has been sharply curtailed, and Congress has slashed the maximum amount the CFPB can spend by roughly 50%. More recently, the administration has put forward a plan that would reduce the staffing level by 63% of the level it was at when the first Trump administration ended and by 68% of the level it was at when the second Trump Administration took office. For the CFPB’s Supervision and Enforcement divisions, the proposed staffing plan would eliminate roughly 85% of previously authorized positions.

Yet the need for well-regulated and functioning consumer financial markets has not changed. To move forward and accomplish the CFPB’s mission, Congress and the CFPB leadership need to establish guardrails and policies to ensure sustained and stable execution of CFPB’s core responsibilities.

Purpose of the CFPB

Lost in the heated debate over the CFPB’s future is how ordinary and uncontroversial its role is—or at least should be. Beginning with the Consumer Credit Protection Act of 1968, Congress enacted numerous consumer protection laws and tasked the banking regulators and a myriad of other agencies with the administration and enforcement of these laws. The DFA vested most of these responsibilities in the CFPB, directing it to “implement and, where applicable, enforce federal consumer financial law consistently for the purpose of ensuring that all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services and that [those] markets … are fair, transparent, and competitive.” Towards those ends, the DFA authorizes the CFPB to exercise its authorities for the “purposes of ensuring that, with respect to consumer financial products and services:

• Consumers are provided with timely and understandable information to make responsible decisions about financial transactions;
• Consumers are protected from unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts and practices and from discrimination;
• Outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations are regularly identified and addressed in order to reduce unwarranted regulatory burdens;
• Federal consumer financial law is enforced consistently, without regard to the status of a person as a depository institution, in order to promote fair competition; and
• Markets for consumer financial products and services operate transparently and efficiently to facilitate access and innovation.”

Underlying these statutory objectives is the potential for consumer financial markets to lead to detrimental outcomes for consumers and to the markets themselves. These can stem from both the inherent complexity of many consumer financial products and consumers’ limited bandwidth to shop for and compare products with multi-dimensional pricing and features. Consequently, even if the terms of a product are fully and fairly disclosed, consumers are not always able to make decisions that take into account all the possible outcomes of a financial transaction, particularly if the transaction is one they engage in infrequently, such as financing the purchase of a home or car, or where costs or other consequences turn on subsequent, hard-to-predict events. This, in turn, can create incentives for firms to structure and market products in ways that may exploit these limitations of consumers’ decisionmaking abilities.

To help the functioning of the markets and advance consumer welfare, the government can step in as it has for decades with many consumer financial protection laws the CFPB is now tasked with implementing and, where applicable, enforcing. Government intervention can take, and has taken, many forms—from requiring disclosure of key information to consumers in standardized and comprehensible language to reduce search costs and facilitate informed decisionmaking by consumers to prohibiting business practices that may mislead consumers or may exploit limitations in consumers’ decisionmaking or otherwise lead to harmful and inefficient outcomes.

Of course, government intervention—even a simple disclosure requirement—imposes costs on the providers of financial services, and at least some of those costs may be passed onto consumers. Moreover, to the extent government regulates the terms on which consumer financial products can be offered, it constrains options that otherwise would be available to consumers and may, derivatively, restrict the ability of some consumers to obtain certain products or services. Regulation thus requires a balancing to provide protection without overcorrecting in ways that disserve consumers and overburden markets. The DFA recognizes this in defining the CFPB’s mission and objectives.

Accomplishments

Throughout its history, the CFPB has been criticized, often vehemently, by stakeholders on opposite sides of the spectrum for either under or overweighing such competing considerations. It is not our intent to evaluate the merits of these criticisms in general or with respect to any particular action. But it is important, before turning to our perspective of what needs to change, to be clear as to what we see as the CFPB’s key accomplishments.

Perhaps the best way to do that is by turning back to the statute. The DFA sets out five “primary functions” for the CFPB. In its 15-year history, the CFPB has made great progress in carrying out each of these functions, with many examples to show for its work.

• The CFPB is tasked with “conducting financial education programs.” Towards that end, the CFPB has created simple, clear materials to help consumers understand complex financial topics, and it has produced educational materials, including train-the-trainer programs, for groups working with consumers to develop their financial knowledge. The CFPB also formulated a framework for conceptualizing the role that financial literacy and financial capability play in enhancing consumer well-being and developed an instrument for measuring financial well-being that has gained widespread acceptance.
• The CFPB is tasked with “collecting, investigating, and responding to consumer complaints.” Accordingly, the CFPB created a portal through which consumers can submit a complaint about a financial institution which, if complete, non-duplicative, and within the CFPB’s jurisdiction, is then electronically routed to the subject of the complaint for a prompt response. In 2025, the CFPB received over 6 million actionable complaints that were routed to more than 4,000 financial institutions for response, and in almost all cases responses were provided in a timely manner.
• The CFPB is tasked with “collecting, researching, monitoring, and publishing information relevant to the functioning of markets for consumer financial products and services to identify risks to consumers and the proper functioning of such markets.” The CFPB has routinely published reports on the consumer financial markets, using its unique data collection authorities to report on emerging or understudied For example, in 2024 the CFPB issued over a dozen research reports including two reports drawing upon surveys conducted by the Office of Research using a unique sampling and weighting methodology; others using lab and field testing designed by CFPB economists and social scientists; and several reports drawing on data from the CFPB’s Consumer Credit Information Panel and from financial service providers to report on trends in various consumer financial markets.
• The CFPB is tasked with “supervising covered persons [i.e., bank and non-bank financial service providers] for compliance with Federal consumer financial law.” To do so, the CFPB built a bank and non-bank supervision program that was designed to support a level playing field in the oversight of providers of consumer financial services and prioritized companies for examination based on an assessment of the risk posed to consumers. Through a set of rulemakings, the CFPB established benchmarks that define which consumer reporting agencies, debt collection firms, student loan servicers, auto financing companies, and remittance providers are subject to the CFPB’s supervisory jurisdiction. The CFPB also developed a program to publicize the findings from supervisory examination—in an anonymized fashion—to aid in compliance by institutions that were not the object of a particular exam.
• The CFPB is tasked with “taking appropriate enforcement action to address violations of Federal consumer financial law.” To do so the CFPB developed a process to initiate enforcement investigations where findings from a supervisory examination, consumer or whistleblower complaints, or other information suggest that the subject of the investigation may be violating the law in a manner that potentially warrants enforcement activity. From 2013 to 2024, such investigations resulted, on average, in the filing of around 30 enforcement actions per year. Some of these enforcement actions were filed jointly with other agencies, both federal and state. These include the Wells Fargo case challenging the bank’s practice of opening credit card and savings accounts for checking account consumers without their authorization, which was a joint action with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the City of Los Angeles; an action filed by the CFPB and 49 state attorneys general against the largest nonbank mortgage loan servicer; and one brought by the CFPB, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and 49 state and District of Columbia attorneys general against a bank mortgage servicer.
• Finally, the CFPB is tasked with “issuing rules, orders, and guidance implementing federal consumer financial law.” Much of the CFPB’s rulemaking activity has consisted of mandated rulemakings to implement parts of the DFA. These include rulemakings under the ability-to-repay and qualified mortgage provisions enacted by Congress to address problems behind the mortgage products that helped cause the financial crisis (DFA Sections 1411 and 1412); a rulemaking to create transparent pricing for remittances (DFA Section 1073); and more recently, a personal data rights rulemaking (DFA Section 1033). The CFPB has not hesitated to reconsider and revise aspects of these rules in response to concerns voiced by stakeholders and has developed a regulatory implementation function to guide financial institutions in implementing these statutory and regulatory requirements.

Directors appointed by presidents of both parties have extolled the consumer protection successes under their leadership. More objective observers have also praised the CFPB’s accomplishments: Ten years after the establishment of the CFPB, the Taskforce on Consumer Financial Law appointed by then-Director Kathy Kraninger, while critical of some aspects of the CFPB’s performance and offering multiple recommendations for change, nonetheless concluded that the CFPB had “generated an impressive record.”

Missteps and lessons learned

Although the CFPB’s accomplishments are manifold, developments over the CFPB’s 15-year history point the way towards structural and other reforms.

When the DFA was enacted, the CFPB was envisioned as an independent agency with a director serving a fixed term who could only be removed for cause. The agency’s funding was designed to be independent of annual appropriations at an amount that was capped but with a built-in inflation adjustment. However, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Seila Law in 2020, which gave the president the authority to remove the director at will, has placed the CFPB under the political control of the White House. Since then the agency’s priorities and operations have moved more with the prevailing political winds, resulting in even heavier criticism from the party out of power than the CFPB had previously experienced.

An agency with changing political leadership is expected to shift its priorities. However, the speed and extent of the CFPB’s pendulum swings have undermined its credibility as a regulator committed to fairly implementing and enforcing the laws Congress has written. Furthermore, these extreme swings are destabilizing for the market for consumer financial products and services, and they undermine the goal of assuring that markets are “fair, transparent, and competitive.”

Events of the past year exemplify how extreme the pendulum has swung.  For all intents and purposes, the CFPB stopped discharging many of its statutory obligations and has even disclaimed the existence of many such obligations. For example, the DFA requires the director to issue semi-annual reports covering nine defined topics, which current Acting Director Russell Vought failed to do in his first year in office dating to the beginning of this administration. The DFA requires the CFPB’s Office of Research to conduct research on six defined topic areas and to issue reports on the results of its research, yet it issued only one research report of any sort during the first year of the Acting Director Vought’s tenure. The DFA tasks the CFPB with “supervising covered persons for compliance with federal consumer financial law,” yet the supervision program was effectively shut down for much or all of 2025. The DFA directs the CFPB to ensure that “federal consumer financial law is enforced consistently, without regard to the status of a person as a depository institution,” yet the CFPB has indicated that it plans to “shift the focus of supervisory activity to depository institutions.” Indeed, in October 2025 Acting Director Vought publicly stated that, “We don’t have anyone working there [at the CFPB] except our Republican appointees and a few career [employees] that are doing statutory responsibilities while we close down the agency,” which he said he expected would happen “within the next two, three months.” Ultimately, the CFPB has survived, but the most recent report to Congress contains, apart from a description of the active regulatory—or, more precisely, deregulatory—agenda, mostly a catalog of what the CFPB has stopped or curtailed doing.

During the Biden administration, the complaints about the CFPB were of a different sort—namely, that the director was seeking to advance the administration’s political agenda by taking actions that exceeded the CFPB’s authority. While critics objected to the CFPB’s exercise of its rulemaking authority, they at least had recourse to the courts and to Congress to review those rules. Indeed, virtually every time the “Biden CFPB” issued a rule that had the force of law, trade associations almost immediately filed suit—often in a district court in Texas known for being industry friendly. Industry succeeded in obtaining court injunctions against three CFPB rules while two other rules were overturned by Congress before a district court had a chance to act. Only one rule was upheld by the courts and that rule was stayed during the litigation including a still-pending appeal.

In other respects, Biden-era Director Rohit Chopra took actions that were largely insulated from external review. Between 2022 and 2024 the CFPB issued 16 “circulars” that it claimed were designed “to provide guidance to other agencies with consumer financial protection responsibilities on how the CFPB intends to enforce federal consumer financial law.” Each of these circulars effectively denominated actions or practices that the CFPB viewed as unlawful. In addition to the circulars, one policy statement, seven “bulletins” and 11 “advisory opinions” (also referred to as “interpretive rules”) were issued during this time period in final form without prior notice and an opportunity to comment. Although none of these documents were legally binding—they expressed the CFPB’s views on legal questions, and the Supreme Court has concluded that the judiciary ultimately must resolve such questions—financial institutions that continued practices condemned by the CFPB in a circular or an advisory opinion were put on notice that they would do so at their peril.

To be sure, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) does leave room for agencies to issue policy statements and interpretive rules, and these tools can provide regulated entities with a clearer understanding of a regulator’s expectations. But interpretive rules are somewhat blunt instruments in that they only allow an agency to opine on what an existing statute or regulation means and do not provide an opportunity to specify more concretely steps that would satisfy a statutory or regulatory requirement, even where the subject of the interpretive rule poses novel compliance questions. Further, the CFPB’s heavy reliance on such pronouncements to address novel and contentious issues deprived stakeholders of the opportunity to have input and deprived the CFPB of the benefit of such input in formulating its own position. Although the CFPB did provide stakeholders with the opportunity to submit comments after each advisory opinion was issued, we are not aware of any instance in which the CFPB revised or revisited an opinion after receiving such comments.

Perhaps even more problematic—and more controversial—were various supervisory and enforcement actions initiated by the CFPB, particularly during the Biden era. While the phrase “rulemaking by enforcement” is often bandied about quite loosely to attack virtually any use of the enforcement authority, we believe this term can be fairly applied to certain actions to challenge widespread industry practices absent indication in preexisting regulation or caselaw that, when the practices in question took place, they were unlawful.

It is, of course, understandable why the CFPB chose the supervisory or enforcement route given that, if the CFPB had proceeded by rule, its actions almost certainly would have faced a legal challenge in a forum chosen by industry to maximize industry’s chance of success. And defenders of the CFPB have fairly noted that the use of enforcement proceedings rather than rulemakings to develop the law is not unique to the CFPB and has been blessed by the Supreme Court. At the same time, it is understandable why critics of the CFPB have found it destabilizing for the CFPB to attempt to hold an individual company liable for actions that had never previously been challenged and to impose civil penalties on such a firm.

To be sure, companies that believe they were wronged in a supervisory or enforcement action do have some means of challenging the action. The CFPB has an internal appeals process for financial institutions faced with a supervisory action, but those appeals are to be heard by a committee of CFPB managers—a process unlikely to engender confidence in its objectivity. And although in principle the targets of an enforcement action (including actions brought against a financial institution for non-compliance with a supervisory directive) can litigate the case and obtain a judicial determination on the merits of the CFPB’s theories, the reality is that firms have a strong incentive to settle enforcement cases to avoid the high costs of litigation and reputational harm they might suffer from dragging it out. This may partially explain the frequency with which enforcement actions are resolved through consent decrees entered into contemporaneously with the filing of a complaint even in cases in which the CFPB was seeking to push the boundaries of the law. To the extent an individual firm chooses to settle to avoid financial or reputational costs, the precedent set can affect the market as a whole without any opportunity for those affected—other than the single entity that is party to the enforcement action—to weigh in as they could in a notice-and-comment rulemaking process.

The actions that were taken to inflate the CFPB’s role and the actions that are being taken to neuter the CFPB are, in our view, risky, high-stakes attempts to maximize short-run power and authority of the party in power at the expense of long-term stability. This results in convulsing rules of the road for market participants and equally convulsing levels of protection for consumers. Further, when the federal government alternates sharply between over-regulation and hyper enforcement on the one hand and deregulation and lax or non-existent enforcement on the other, state governments are left to fill in gaps in enforcing consumer protection laws, resulting in inconsistent levels of protection across state boundaries and inconsistent rules of the road for firms operating across state lines.

Where to go from here

Consumers and financial markets would benefit from a stable CFPB that updates and enforces bedrock laws that have been in force for decades and carries out the functions assigned to it by Congress, particularly in addressing new products, technologies, and market practices. Different administrations should shape the direction of the CFPB’s work according to their priorities. But guardrails are needed to keep the pendulum swings within reasonable metes and bounds.

Since the earliest days of the CFPB, the most frequently proposed structural reforms have been substituting a multi-member commission for the CFPB’s single-director structure and subjecting the CFPB to annual Congressional appropriations. However, in the current polarized climate, we’ve witnessed multi-member commissions succumbing to dramatic swings in the direction of the party in power, and that will likely be more true if, as is widely expected, the Supreme Court holds that all members of such commissions serve at the pleasure of the president. Similarly, it is difficult to fathom how requiring the CFPB to secure funding from Congress each year would help in depoliticizing or moderating the actions of the agency. The Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have never been subject to Congressional appropriations, and we see no reason to treat the CFPB differently. Congress retains legal authority to adjust the CFPB’s budget as it did in 2025 in the One Big Beautiful Act.

Nonetheless, there are several steps Congress could and should take that would at least partially address some of the problems we have discussed.

Undoubtedly the hardest problem to solve legislatively is that of a director and administration disinterested in, or hostile to, the CFPB’s statutory mission. Given that even the current administration has come to concede, however grudgingly, that it cannot disregard duties explicitly imposed by statute, like the release of statutorily required reports, there may be some value in Congress being more prescriptive as to what it expects of the CFPB. For example, the statutory language governing supervision of large banks (Dodd-Frank Section 1025) is less explicit than the provision governing supervision of non-banks (Dodd-Frank Section 1024(b)) with respect to the CFPB’s obligations; to the extent there is ambiguity, Congress could amend the statute to remove any doubt that supervision of banks as well as non-banks is a statutorily required function. Beyond that, Congress could establish statutory standards as to what constitutes a minimally acceptable level of performance of statutory duties—for example, standards as to the minimum number of examinations that must be conducted in a given year for banks and for non-banks coupled with public reporting, in an anonymized format, of both the number of exams conducted and the outcomes of the examinations. While we are not so naïve as to believe that statutory prescription and public reporting can assure bona fide administrative compliance, explicit statutory expectations nonetheless seem preferable to leaving the director with unbounded discretion in deciding what constitutes an acceptable level of performance.

There are other areas in which we think legislation can make more of a difference.

First, Congress should insulate certain positions from the vicissitudes of the political process by designating those positions as ones to be held by career appointees. Political staff appointed by the presidentially-chosen director may be important for implementing the director’s (and president’s) vision, but day-to-day oversight of the statutorily-mandated functions—including, e.g., supervisory, enforcement, and researchs well as the legal division—should be the responsibility of career civil servants. Thus, positions such as the assistant directors for supervision, enforcement, and research, as well as the general counsel, should be career positions, a practice sharply curtailed during the Biden administration. This would ensure some degree of consistency and some level of objectivity in the CFPB’s decisionmaking processes without undermining the ability of the director to steer the ship. One potential new challenge to shielding career employees from political influence is the regulation promulgated by the Office of Personnel Management stripping civil service protections from career government employees involved in policymaking. If that regulation survives judicial review, Congress or the director should clarify that these positions are not policy but operational so that they are not held by at-will employees serving at the discretion of political leadership.

Second, Congress should take steps to curb rulemaking by supervision or enforcement by providing for independent review of certain decisions by the director and, at the same time, by removing the disincentive that currently exists to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking by restricting forum shopping. For example, somewhat similar to what Congress has provided by law for some banking regulators, Congress could create a confidential, independent appeals process to which supervised entities could appeal decisions made under supervisory authority or to which firms could challenge decisions by the director to initiate an enforcement action before the action is filed. In doing so, Congress should establish criteria for membership in an appeals forum to ensure that appeals panels are composed of individuals with the requisite subject matter expertise and with diverse experiences so that these panels are both expert and balanced. Further, Congress should require that the members be chosen in a manner to assure their neutrality and independence. Any such reform should be accompanied by legislation that puts an end to the ability of industry (and consumer advocates) to shop for a favorable forum and drag out litigation challenging rules issued by the CFPB by requiring that all such challenges be brought in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Challenges to regulations under the Administrative Procedure Act rarely, if ever, require fact-finding—they are decided on the administrative record—so there is no apparent advantage to requiring such challenges to begin in a district court. And, in part because of its location and in part because there are multiple other statutes that centralize review in the D.C. Circuit, that court has developed specialized expertise in adjudicating APA cases. Following the model of these other statutes and consolidating review in the D.C. Circuit would breathe new life into the CFPB’s rulemaking function and reduce the temptation to rely on supervision and enforcement to advance the law.

Beyond these statutory reforms which, we would hope, could attract some bipartisan support, there are steps that could be taken absent any statutory change that would enhance the CFPB’s credibility and effectiveness and better ensure that it is carrying out its vitally important responsibilities.

The most logical place to begin given the CFPB’s current derelictions of duty is with Congress’ own dereliction in exercising oversight of the CFPB. As we have noted, the DFA expressly mandates semi-annual reporting to Congress on a set of specified topics, and further requires the director to appear semi-annually before both the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the CFPB. However, Acting Director Vought has now served for over 15 months without being called upon to testify even once. Congress should demand accountability of the director as specified in the law and do so in a way that brings transparency to the extent to which the CFPB has shut down or massively constrained various functions, from supervision and enforcement to research and market monitoring.

Given the current political environment, the CFPB inspector general has a crucial role to play. The office of the inspector general (OIG) with responsibility for the CFPB claims that, “we make recommendations to improve economy, efficiency, and effectiveness, and we prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse” through its oversight responsibilities. Whether the CFPB has been wasting government resources by paying a large number of employees who were precluded from working is worthy of an investigation. Yet the inspector general has been silent. In fact, the inspector general had begun an investigation into how the CFPB was using its office space, but when CFPB leadership closed the physical office, rather than pivot and study the consequences and efficacy of that move, the OIG closed the investigation altogether, even though the DFA expressly requires the CFPB to maintain a “principal office” in the District of Columbia. Re-instilling confidence in the CFPB will almost certainly require the OIG be more pro-active than it has been lately.

Finally, under the Vacancy Reform Act, Acting Director Vought’s term must come to an end in August, at which point the deputy director will become acting director until a new director is nominated and confirmed. Although statutory change is the only way to cement the structural reforms we have proposed, a new director—whether acting or permanent—does not have to wait for legislation to make changes for at least the duration of their administration. We saw this happen during the first Trump administration when Director Kraninger, who served from December 2018 until January 2021, recommitted to using the CFPB’s various tools to achieving the CFPB’s mission. A new director likewise could elevate career appointees to key roles of authority. The director could also implement the kind of independent and neutral appeals process we have proposed. Indeed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has recently created an Office of Supervisory Appeals, and the OCC has proposed reforming its supervisor appeals process; these could inform changes to the CFPB’s supervisory appeals process and to the creation of an enforcement appeals process (although we believe the FDIC’s model falls short in requiring only a member with industry experience, and not a member with experience representing consumers, on appeals panels).

Finally, the director could and should take steps to enhance the credibility of the CFPB’s rulemaking process by resuming peer review of CFPB research used in rulemaking proceedings. CFPB researchers frequently conduct studies in conjunction with a rulemaking that rely on data that is confidential or proprietary and that therefore cannot be made available to outside researchers. Given that, under Director Kraninger, the CFPB began to rely on a federal advisory committee called the Academic Research Council (ARC) to review, critique, and validate its research. The ARC included leading researchers in the consumer finance field who were appointed as special government employees and who provided a rigorous, objective evaluation of important, technical work. The current Trump administration disbanded the ARC, along with other discretionary advisory committees. The ARC should be reinstated as a neutral, expert body and reassigned the peer review responsibilities given to it under the first Trump administration. Further, the ARC could play a valuable role in reviewing and providing recommendations to CFPB economists with respect to the cost-benefit analyses of proposed and final rules they are required to prepare, whether those analyses are conducted pursuant to the requirements of Executive Order 12866 as President Trump has mandated or to the less prescriptive requirements of the cost-benefit provision of the DFA. The ARC could also assist in evaluating the CFPB’s required five-year reviews of significant rules issued by the CFPB.

Together, these reforms could take the temperature down and bring some measure of stability to a core function of the federal government: protecting consumers in their selection and use of financial products and markets. A new director committed to responsibly executing the CFPB’s statutory mission could lead others to take a long-term view of consumer financial protection and an appreciation for seeking a consensus for reforms in the context of a changing market. Outside stakeholders can do their part to support efforts to bring about stability and to challenge extreme, destabilizing acts even when it comes from their own tribe. The state of play now—a federal agency charged with protecting consumers lying virtually dormant, scattershot efforts at the state level to compensate, and individuals having to take it upon themselves to hold firms accountable for upholding the law in the face of massive barriers—is not good for consumers, and it’s not good for the market.