36 hours after Russell Vought took over the consumer office, closed his operations

The day before Linda Wetzel closed her retirement home in Southport in NC, 2012 – a cozy place where she could open windows at night and catch an ocean breeze at night. Mrs. Wetzel has explored his mortgage paperwork and could not find the accusations published anywhere.

Mrs. Wetzel made payment and then filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Authority. The bank quickly opened an investigation and a month later sent her a check of $ 5,600.

“My first idea was” thank you “. I was in tears,” she remembered. “This money was a year or two savings on my mortgages.” It was my little nest. “

Mrs. Wetzel’s return is a small piece of work that the Bureau has since been created in 2011. He returned $ 21 billion for consumers. It Slavs for pumping, reformed the market with a student loan, Transformed Rules for Mortgage Loans and forced banks and transmitters of money on to compensate the victims of fraud.

This will no longer be able to do this work.

President Trump named Russell Vought on Friday, who was confirmed The day earlier to lead the Office for Proceedings and Budget, as the acting director of the agency. Mr. Vought was the author of the 2025 project, a conservative plan for increasing the federal government that demanded significant changes, including the abolition of the consumer office.

In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. Saturday Ordered 1,700 employees of the Bureau to stop almost all their work and announce plans to interrupt the agency’s financing. Then on Sunday, he Closed the presidency headquarters for the upcoming week. Workers who tried to get their notebooks from the office were averted, the employees said.

The Bureau “has been awakened by the agency and weapons against the industry and individuals for a long time,” wrote Mr. Vought on Sunday about X. “It must end.”

Created by Congress as a result of a housing crisis that triggered a large recession, Consumer Bureau has become one of the most feared regulatory bodies of Wall StreetWith the power to issue new rules – and penalize companies for their violation – around mortgages, credit cards, student loans, credit reporting and other areas that affect the financial life of millions of Americans.

The Action of the Bureau made it a flash for criticism of banks and Republican legislators – and put it directly into the Cross hair of Trump’s administration.

The enemies of the agencies have long called for elimination, which has only congress. Elon Musk, a billionaire of the leader of the government team of efficiency, who created confusion throughout the federal government, published on Friday on his social media platform “CFPB RIP”. A few hours ago, his collaborators gained access to the Consumer Office’s computer systems.

During the first Trump administration, when the Republicans dominated both chambers of congress, lawmakers could not collect enough votes to cancel the agency. Some indicated that they would like to try again. Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican Tennessee, which serves in the Senate Banking Committee, called the “Rogue Agency” Bureau On Sunday in CBS News “Face The Nation”.

“Basically, it was an unscrupulous agency that was allowed to go far beyond the mandate, which I think was originally intended,” Mr. Hagery said. “It’s time for it.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, who fought for the agency’s creation and described as her “mom” on her X biography, has spent the last decade attempts to dismantle the consumer office.

“President Trump led the campaign for helping families, but Russ Vought just said Wall Street that it was an open season for fraudulent families,” she said on Sunday in a written statement. “What Veaght is doing is illegal and dangerous and we will defend ourselves.”

Many agencies directly influenced American pocket books. Its rules reworked the mortgage market and reduced the types of subprime loans that triggered the housing crisis. The pressure of the Bureau led the main banks to reduce or remove their pump fees, and a recently completed rule would limit most of these fees to $ 5.

The agency recently adopted the rules to eliminate medical debt from credit messages and restrictions on most credit card fees to $ 8 or less per month, but the litigation has delayed these rules in force.

“It is remarkable for me that the economic dissatisfaction of people has created the Office for Financial Protection of Consumer and the economic dissatisfaction of people created Trump” said Shayak Sarkar, Professor of Law to the University of California, Davis.

Mr. Trump’s team favored attacks on specific agencies – as the US Agency for International Development and Consumer Office – that serves vulnerable populations, Sarkar said, throwing “lots of federal support and cheering” for agencies such as immigration customs such as immigration customs and enforcement that has intensified their immigration interventions.

While the Bureau cannot be closed without a congress event, its director has the power to radically change his approach. During the first term of office Mr. Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney – the then director of the budget office, which now leads – as the reigning director of the Bureau. Mr. Mulvaney called the agency “Joke” “sick, sad way” And it sharply limited to coercive measures and the rules worked.

The agencies turned as a pendulum. He moved aggressively as the Democrats held the White House, but during the first term of Mr. Trump, they retreated. Mr. Mulvaney and his successor appointed by the trump Kathleen Kraninger, put the presidency into any hibernation, Redemption rules This would make most of the payout market and reduce the coercive measures of the Bureau.

However, several current agencies who spoke intimately for fear of retribution said on Saturday that Mr. Voodes’s order was offering what happened during the last Trump administration.

His instruction to “stop all supervision and examination activities” caused a specific alarm. While other federal agencies – including the federal corporation of deposit insurance, the federal reserve system and the currency administrator – also oversee banks, the consumer office is the only regulator for non -banking creditors. These companies have a large share in the mortgage market of $ 13 trillion.

Mr. Vought also said that he intends to cut off the financing of the consumer authority, which comes directly from the federal reserve system, outside the usual congress process. The budget of the Fiscal Year 2025 requires an annual spending of approximately $ 800 million and in January the Fed transferred $ 245 million to the Bureau to fulfill its last request.

Mr. Vought wrote on X that Fed said that the Bureau would not take further drawing of financing “because it is not” reasonably necessary “to fulfill his duties”.

Adam Levitin, professor of Georgetown Law, who specializes in financial regulation, said on Sunday that Mr. Vough’s orders could be illegal. Some of the federal laws managed by the consumer authority order to ensure that it should be taken to specific entities, and this work does not seem to be discretion, he said.

The reigning director “He has the ability to seriously brake CFPB with a lot of slow bleeding, but trying to skip all the necessary steps and just go for an immediate blow of death,” Levitin said. “Maybe it won’t really have the legal ability to do it, but I’m not sure how much it will matter.” Many of the way Trump’s administration is engaged in regulatory agencies is just like that a key part creates fear, uncertainty and chaos. ”

AND assembly on Saturday Outside the headquarters of the Bureau, organized by his employees of the Union, he attracted several hundred participants. The inhabitants of Maryland, who asked her name to be detained for fear of retribution from the Allies Mr. Trump, attended her husband, a federal worker to support the agency’s employees.

“I don’t think people understand what CFPB is doing,” she said. “The administration said they were closing it for fraud, but the literal work of the Bureau is to protect people from fraud and unhealthy fees and predatory creditors.”

Mrs. Wetzel, a pensioner who used a return of $ 5,600 to replace floors in her new home, said that a quick action for her complaint caused her to feel authorized.

“It was such a relief when the government said that what the bank did was bad that it was not a rule of law,” she said.