The Trump Administration’s Plan for Protecting Consumers? Politely Ask Companies to Behave.

Photo: White House Press Briefing. Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought answers a reporter’s question at a press briefing Monday, March 11, 2019, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. Photo credit: Official White House photo by Tia Dufour via Flickr. Public Domain. Article by Andy Kroll. ProPublica – August 31, 2026.

In mid-July testimony before Congress, Russell Vought boasted that, as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’d refashioned the agency’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans — the role Congress had created for the agency after the 2008 economic crash. Vought had spent the first 18 months of the new Trump administration trying to dismantle the bureau, much as he and other appointees had done with the U.S. Agency for International Development. At CFPB, he’d ordered mass layoffs, tried to choke off the bureau’s funding and ended the lease on its headquarters, attempting to make good on his vow to put civil servants “in trauma.” […]

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