Chicago employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are pleading for the public’s help after the Trump administration all but halted its enforcement work.
The consumer protection agency says it has saved consumers over $20 billion since it was created in 2011. But those efforts have nearly ceased since employees of the bureau were ordered to stop working earlier this month.
“We protect American consumers every day. Right now we need American consumers to step in and protect us,” Joe Sanders, an enforcement attorney at the agency and union member, told the Sun-Times during a rally Thursday at Federal Plaza. “Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your elected representatives.”
Employees said they have been locked out of their downtown Chicago office since Feb. 8, when the employees were told to stop working and placed on administrative leave with pay.
Since then, the agency is processing 80% fewer consumer complaints, according to a report by Senate Democrats and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who came up with the idea for the bureau created in 2011.
Trump has vowed to dismantle the agency, calling it earlier this month a hotbed of “waste, fraud and abuse.” The agency on Thursday dropped a lawsuit it had filed against Capital One, alleging the bank tricked consumers out of $2 billion.
Mass firings have been halted by a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the bureau’s employees.
“It’s anxiety,” said Matthew Tybor, a Chicago-based CFPB examiner and union member. His job is to investigate consumer complaints, but he hasn’t been able to since the stop-work order.
He spoke at the rally outside the bureau’s office in the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building, where he said about 100 agency employees work.
“Every week, thousands of Americans reach out to the CFPB to help with their mortgages, student loans, credit cards, debt collectors, medical debt. We handle all these complaints personally and get results,” he told a crowd that included supporters from the activist organization Indivisible Chicago.
Rally attendees held signs reading: “Protect the CFPB, Protect the public” and “Stop the billionaire butcher,” referring to Elon Musk and his cost-cutting through the Department of Government Efficiency.
The press office of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did not immediately return a request for comment.
Consumer advocates say the agency has been under attack since President Donald Trump fired the bureau’s director, Rohit Chopra, on Feb. 1. Trump replaced him with Russell Vought, the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, who then emailed bureau employees to cease “all supervision and examination activity.”
Bureau employees say they are proud of their work and are eager to return to it.
The agency is credited with enforcement actions against Wells Fargo, which was hit with a record $3.7 billion fine in 2022. The agency also spurred changes to bank overdraft fees and insufficient funds policies, projected to save consumers an estimated $6.1 billion each year. The bureau has enforced the Military Lending Act, which offers consumer protection to active-duty service members.
Sanders, the bureau’s attorney, said he has personally benefited from the agency’s action to pressure credit reporting bureaus to remove medical debt from consumers’ profiles. The agency’s work has helped nearly 23 million Americans get at least one medical debt removed. But the agency’s new leadership has paused the rule.
“I know how hard it was to get that [medical debt] removed,” he said. “I think (pausing the rule is) going to hurt a lot of people.”