Consumer financial watchdog is ordered by acting director to stop fighting financial abuse

Russell Vought, the newly installed acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sent an email Saturday night ordering all employees at the consumer watchdog to stop virtually all work — including fighting financial abuse.

Russell Vought, the newly installed acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sent an email Saturday night ordering all employees at the consumer watchdog to stop virtually all work — including fighting financial abuse. “Effective immediately, unless expressly approved by the Acting Director or required by law, all employees, contractors and other personnel of the bureau shall…cease all supervision and examination activity,” Vought wrote in the email, a copy of which was viewed by CNN. In practice, this means that the nation’s top consumer financial watchdog has effectively been pulled off the street, prevented from providing oversight over big banks, payday lenders and other financial institutions that could be hurting consumers. “This means that nobody is actually overseeing $18 trillion in consumer debt right now to make sure millions of Americans aren’t getting ripped off,” one former CFPB official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told CNN. Vought posted on X on Saturday night that he “notified the Federal Reserve that CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties” and that the CFPB had an “excessive” balance of $711.6 million. This new order from Vought goes a step further than the one sent by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on February 3 that ordered CFPB staff to stop issuing rules, suspend rules that have not yet been issued or published, not to issue public communications and to stop making court filings other than to seek a pause.