The future of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau hangs in the balance as President Trump’s administration tries to weaken it and possibly shut it down. There are legal battles over whether he and Elon Musk, the tech leader he appointed to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have the authority to shut down the agency since Congress created it.
The first leader of that bureau said there’s reason for concern and alarm with what’s the Trump administration is doing with his former bureau right now.
“They are moving through the federal government with kind of a wrecking ball without giving a lot of forethought, without figuring out how things fit together, just for the sake of trying to break things and see what the reaction is," said Richard Cordray, a former Ohio treasurer and attorney general who ran for governor against Mike DeWine in 2018.
Cordray, who became the CFPB's first director in 2013, said it's important to remember why it was created in the first place. He explained it was created after the 2008 mortgage crisis that brought down the nation's economy, causing millions of people to lose their homes and their jobs.
"The CFPB was put in place to stabilize the mortgage market, to make it stable and more effective and safe for people to borrow and buy homes and to put in other protections for us and our families against financial companies being able to rip us off and cheat us without any financial consequences," Cordray said.
Cordray said the CFPB has saved consumers billions, and that shutting it down would be a mistake.
“It would be terrible for consumers because it would remove all of the protections that have been put into place that have gotten all of the money back for people; $21 billion that was wrongfully taken from them over the last 15 years by a series of different acts by financial companies that were rectified because of the work of the consumer bureau," Cordray said.
But Cordray said he does think the CFPB will ultimately survive and will still be around in four years, because it would take an act of Congress to repeal it and he doesn’t believe lawmakers in Washington will do that.
Cordray has declined to say whether he's considering running for elected office again in Ohio.
