# CFPB The **Consumer Financial Protection Bureau** is the consumer-finance regulator created by the 2010 [[Dodd-Frank Act]] — [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s design — to police mortgages, credit cards, payday lenders, debt collectors and bank fees, with a single director and funding drawn from the [[Federal Reserve]] rather than annual appropriations. Both design choices were meant to insulate it from industry and Congress; both became the handles by which it was dismantled. In the vault it is **the test case for killing an agency by defunding and attrition rather than repeal**: nobody has abolished the CFPB, and as of September 2026 it barely functions. ## Structure, and the two constitutional wounds The single-director structure lost its for-cause removal protection in [[Seila Law v. CFPB]] (June 29, 2020), which made the director removable at will while leaving the agency standing. Six years to the day later, [[Trump v. Slaughter]] (June 29, 2026) overruled *Humphrey's Executor* and brought every multi-member commission under the same rule — so the CFPB's constitutional isolation ended by everyone else being made like it. The Fed-funding mechanism survived a challenge in *CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association* (2024), which is why the administration attacked the money through other doors. ## 2025–26: the shutdown by other means 1. **The stop-work order.** In February 2025 [[Russell Vought]], as acting director, ordered staff to stop nearly all work, closed the headquarters, and sought to cut the workforce by roughly 90%. The National Treasury Employees Union sued; Judge Amy Berman Jackson enjoined the mass reductions-in-force (*NTEU v. Vought*), and the injunction has held through a D.C. Circuit panel, a grant of en banc rehearing (January 2026) and an en banc argument (early 2026). 2. **The funding cap.** The [[Big Beautiful Bill]] (July 4, 2025) cut the bureau's Fed-transfer ceiling from 12% to 6.5% of the Fed's 2009 operating expenses — about a 46% cut, capping FY2026 transfers at $466.8M against a stated compliance need of $677.5M. 3. **The zero-request theory.** Vought then argued the bureau could not lawfully draw *any* funds because the Fed was running losses ("combined earnings"), and requested nothing. The district court rejected the theory in December 2025 and ordered the bureau to request funding; it complied in January 2026; a second ruling on March 13, 2026 reaffirmed that the director cannot starve the agency. 4. **The restructuring plan.** In April 2026 the bureau filed a plan to go from 1,174 employees (already down from an authorised 1,723) to **556** — a 53% cut from the present and 68% from the FY2025 level — pending court permission it did not yet have. Enforcement has meanwhile been largely halted, pending cases dropped, and the supervision function reduced to a skeleton. The [[Deregulation]] page's third mechanism — deregulation by starvation — is this agency. ## Why it matters The CFPB links from [[Affirm]] and the [[Financial System Hub]] as a regulator, from [[Austerity]] and [[Causal Loop Diagrams]] as a mechanism, and from [[Elizabeth Warren]], [[Maxine Waters]] and the [[Senate Banking Committee]] as the thing they are fighting for. It is also the page on which the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] stops being a doctrine about removal and becomes a doctrine about budgets: if a director appointed to shut an agency can refuse to fund it, the appropriations power has moved from Congress to the appointee. The courts have so far said no. The agency is what "no" looks like after eighteen months. ## See Also - [[Dodd-Frank Act]] · [[Financial Regulation]] · [[Deregulation]] · [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] - [[Seila Law v. CFPB]] · [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Unitary Executive Timeline]] · [[Big Beautiful Bill]] - [[Elizabeth Warren]] · [[Russell Vought]] · [[Maxine Waters]] · [[Senate Banking Committee]] - [[Project 2025]] · [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[FTC]]