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biden administration
Dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Hurts US Consumers
Congress can’t allow the White House to eliminate an agency that’s helped millions of Americans, with billions of dollars returned to them by scams, fraudsters, and megabanks that prey on low-income citizens.
Feb 20, 2026
Over the past year, the Trump administration has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through cuts and layoffs, and by hamstringing its enforcement powers, claiming the agency is hurting large banks through overregulation. Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought has sought to reduce the agency's staff by 90% and to freeze spending since February.
A group of 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, sued the Trump administration in December to stop it from defunding the CFPB. The administration responded by telling the court that the government is legally barred from seeking new funding from the Federal Reserve, the bureau’s primary source of money, alluding to the fact that the agency will eventually go broke later this year. The next step in the case will be the DC Court of Appeals to hear arguments in late February.
The CFPB's enforcement actions, like the 22 pending cases against banks, highlight its vital role in safeguarding consumers from unfair practices, which the current threats jeopardize.
So, what does this mean for the country? The CFPB's weakening could leave consumers vulnerable to predatory practices, unfair fees, and fraud, risking their financial stability.
The Biden administration's pressure on banks and financial institutions on the issue led them to agree to refund more than $240 million to customers, a win secured by actual, formal regulation. Trump and Vought have rolled that back, too.
The CFPB’s Small Dollar Rule was created to curb abusive payday lending practices, especially repeated debit attempts that drain bank accounts and trigger cascading overdraft and Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF) fees. That goal is sound and worthy. The problem is not the rule’s intent, but how it operates alongside bank fee structures and in a financial marketplace devoid of smart, progressive-minded credit options.
The small dollar rule makes automatic repayments—which help keep the cost of borrowing to the bare minimum—incredibly tricky to execute. After two consecutive failed payment attempts, covered lenders generally cannot try again unless the borrower specifically authorizes another attempt, which can leave payments stalled when ordinary life disruptions intervene. Regulators have warned that charging multiple NSF fees tied to re-presented transactions can harm consumers. This is true not just because a single missed payment can still trigger NSF fee collection and financial harm, undermining a rule meant to protect borrowers acting in good faith. It’s also because lenders are now further limiting credit to the most high-risk borrowers, including gig economy workers, who are also those most in need of emergency credit, forcing them to borrow via ultra-expensive bank and credit union overdrafts and NSFs. And when payments are not made, inevitably, borrowers’ personal credit ratings take a hit. Of course, this affects poor people and those with bad credit harder than anyone else.
Trump and Vought's shuttering of the CFPB without fixing this situation, including by pushing banks hard to provide credit to consumers at lower cost and even by standing up a viable alternative to current credit options through something like Postal Banking, would make the problem of high-interest debt worse for Americans. Moreover, because Trump and Vought refuse to act against extortionate overdraft and NSF fees, as the Biden administration did, they’re exposing consumers to high-cost debt, where they effectively borrow from the bank, too. The Biden administration's pressure on banks and financial institutions on the issue led them to agree to refund more than $240 million to customers, a win secured by actual, formal regulation. Trump and Vought have rolled that back, too.
The CFPB has largely helped people when they have problems with a financial institution, product, or transaction by allowing customers to submit complaints, which the agency then works on their behalf. Since its inception, 98% of the 9 million total complaints have received “timely responses” from the institutions or companies to which customers reported them to the CFPB. Of all the complaints, almost 400,000 were submitted by US military members, and nearly 200,000 were submitted by seniors.
The results have been staggering. CFPB data as of December, 2024 shows a whopping $21 billion has been returned to more than 205 million Americans who were financially harmed by institutions. In addition, over $5 billion in civil penalties have been imposed on guilty banks and individuals.
Congress can’t allow the White House to eliminate an agency that’s helped millions of Americans, with billions of dollars returned to them by scams, fraudsters, and megabanks that prey on low-income citizens. And if the Trump administration is determined to do so, it’s time for congressional Democrats to focus on developing credit alternatives that can allow consumers to escape some of the financial madness.
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Mamdani Taps 'Unafraid and Unbought' Julie Su as First NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice
"What a thrilling day for the working class of New York City," said one local labor leader.
Dec 19, 2025
In a move cheered by advocates for the working class, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said Friday that former acting US Labor Secretary Julie Su will serve as the city's first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice.
"Welcome to a new era, Julie Su," Mamdani, a Democrat, said in a social media post announcing the appointment. "As former US secretary of labor, Julie played a central role in fighting for workers, ensuring a just day's pay for a hard day's work, and saving the pensions of more than a million union workers and retirees."
Speaking at a Friday press conference in Staten Island with Mamdani and Deputy Mayor for Housing nominee Leila Bozorg, Su said: "In the richest city in the richest country in the world, no one should be treated as disposable. Dignity on the job is not a privilege but a right, justice is not abstract but it is felt in a paycheck you can live on, a schedule that you can build a life around, a workplace where your voice matters, and a city that has your back.”
Su, who had previously served as California labor secretary and deputy US labor secretary, was nominated by former President Joe Biden to permanently lead the Department of Labor. However, Republicans and some right-wing Democrats in the US Senate blocked her appointment, so Biden installed her in an acting capacity, in which she served from March 2023 until the end of the Democrat's administration in January.
During her tenure, Su championed gig workers; fought to preserve pensions for retirees; pushed for workplace protections from Covid-19 and environmental harms; and helped negotiate labor agreements for healthcare professionals, flight attendants, and others.
Su will now work with Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as he seeks to deliver on his campaign promises of free public childcare and municipal buses, a freeze on rent-stabilized housing, and city-owned grocery stores to residents of the nation's largest city.
"What a thrilling day for the working class of New York City to have the first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice to ensure that our issues are front [and] center at every level of city government," New York Taxi Workers Alliance executive director Bhairavi Desai said in a statement.
"With the appointment of the esteemed Julie Su—who is unafraid and unbought by corporate interests—Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is cementing the highest, uncompromised, and effective standards for a better life for New Yorkers abandoned and betrayed in decades past," Desai added.
The NYC Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO said on Bluesky: "Big news! Julie Su as deputy mayor for economic justice brings deep experience enforcing labor law, fighting wage theft, and standing up for working families."
"She’s known and respected across the labor movement, including here in NYC," the council added. "Looking forward to working with a proven champion for workers at City Hall!"
Service Employees International Union international president April Verrett said on X that Su "has spent her career standing with workers and holding powerful interests to account."
"Bringing her into City Hall says New York is done talking and ready to throw down for the people who keep this city moving," she added.
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Pranksters Trick Former US Official Into Admitting Ukraine War Was Preventable
"This is as close to a smoking gun as I've ever seen on Ukraine," said one observer.
Dec 17, 2025
A former senior Biden administration official admitted during a recent interview with who she thought were aides to Ukraine's president that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have been averted if Kyiv had agreed to stop seeking NATO membership.
Amanda Sloat—a former special assistant to then-President Joe Biden and senior director for Europe at the National Security Council—believed she was speaking with aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week when she sat down for a phone interview with who turned out to be the Russian prankster duo known as Vovan and Lexus.
“We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’—which at that point it may well have done,” Sloat said. “There is certainly a question, three years on now, you know, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do [at the] Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and loss of life.”
However, Biden officials chose not to address Russia's main concerns regarding Ukraine and NATO—with disastrous results.
Sloat explained that she "was uncomfortable with the idea of the US pushing Ukraine" against pursuing NATO membership, "and sort of implicitly giving Russia some sort of sphere of influence or veto power on that."
"I don’t think [then-President Joe] Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then, to tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO," she said.
Sloat is the latest in a series of former US officials who have fallen victim to Vovan and Lexus' pranks, including ex-Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland—who played a key role in a plot to overthrow the pro-Moscow government of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Euromaidan uprising of 2013-14.
Sloat's remarks during the interview implicitly belied the prevalent Western prewar narrative of an unprovoked Russian invasion—an assertion that ignored decades of provocation, beginning with the betrayal of a 1990 assurance by then-US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" if the Soviets cooperated on German reunification.
Not only did NATO admit 13 new nations between then and the start of Russia's 2022 invasion, all of the new members were countries formerly in Moscow's orbit, and three—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were ex-Soviet republics. The Biden administration's public pronouncements of an "open door" to Ukrainian NATO membership continued right up to Russia's invasion, and were particularly intolerable for Moscow—even if Russian leaders understood that the US was actually more opposed to Kyiv joining the alliance than in favor of such a potentially fraught outcome.
Responding to the prank, French political commentator Arnaud Bertrand said on X that "this is as close to a smoking gun as I've ever seen on Ukraine."
"Hundreds of thousands dead, a country in ruins, and the justification is America being 'uncomfortable' about not preserving optionality," he added. "Not even an actual gain—just the theoretical possibility of one day pulling Ukraine into NATO. The banality of evil."
"All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history."
Sloat's comments, noted Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen, come "after our political-media establishment has for four years smeared, censored, and cancelled anyone who claimed that NATO expansion triggered the war."
Referring to Sloat's acknowledgment that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could have been averted with a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic wrote for Responsible Statecraft Tuesday that she "is not the first to have made this admission."
"As I documented two years ago, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and former Biden Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both likewise explicitly said that NATO’s potential expansion into Ukraine was the core grievance that motivated Putin’s decision to invade, and that, at least according to Stoltenberg, NATO rejected compromising on it."
"Zelensky has now publicly agreed to this concession to advance peace talks—only three years later, with Ukraine now in physical ruins, its economy destroyed, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and survivors traumatized and disabled on a mass scale," he lamented.
"All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history," Marcetic added. "Critics of the war and NATO policy have long said the war and its devastating impact could have been avoided by explicitly ruling out Ukrainian entry into NATO, only to be told they were spreading Kremlin propaganda. It turns out they were simply spreading Biden officials' own private thoughts."
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