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consumers
'This Is Your Money': Trump Assault on CFPB Has Cost Consumers $19 Billion
"When you're counting the way that costs have gone up for American families over the last year, be sure to include the cost of getting cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Feb 10, 2026
The Trump administration's ongoing effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cost Americans nearly $20 billion in just a year, according to a report released Monday as Democratic lawmakers and campaigners marked the anniversary of the White House's hostile takeover and gutting of the CFPB.
The new report was assembled by Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an architect and champion of the CFPB. Citing bureau documents, publicly available data, and federal analyses, the report estimates that the Trump administration's mass dismissal of enforcement actions against abusive corporations, failure to distribute settlement payments, rescission of CFPB rules and guidance, and attack on the bureau's Consumer Complaint Program have collectively cost US consumers $19 billion over the past year.
That figure, the report emphasizes, "does not even begin to cover costs Americans could have been scammed out of due to a sidelined CFPB."
“Donald Trump promised to lower costs for Americans ‘On Day One.’ Instead, he is trying to shut down an agency that protects Americans from getting scammed out of their money by big banks and giant corporations,” Warren said in a statement. “As a result, Trump’s attempt to sideline the CFPB has cost families billions of dollars over the last year alone. We're going to keep fighting for the CFPB and against the billionaires who want to get rid of it.”
The report was released to mark one year since Russell Vought, the White House budget chief and acting CFPB director, ordered the bureau to effectively shut down its operations, including rulemaking and investigations into corporate wrongdoing.
Lawmakers have not confirmed Vought—a Project 2025 architect who has been explicit about his desire to kill the CFPB—as bureau chief, but he has remained in the acting director role thanks to White House legal maneuvers. In recent months, Vought has tried to starve the CFPB of funding—an effort that, for now, has been stymied in court.
"We want to put it out," Vought said in an interview late last year, boasting about mass firings that have left the consumer agency skeletal. "We will be successful probably within the next two or three months."
Another ridiculous price tag that Trump is forcing you to pay.
This is YOUR money.
You deserve a government that works for you, not against you and your financial interests. https://t.co/yd6hpYriXw
— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) February 9, 2026
Prior to the start of President Donald Trump's second White House term, the CFPB had returned around $21 billion to US consumers scammed by banks and other corporations since the bureau's creation in the wake of the Great Recession.
"When you're counting the way that costs have gone up for American families over the last year, be sure to include the cost of getting cheated, because Donald Trump has driven that cost through the roof," Warren said during a rally with fellow Democratic lawmakers and advocates in Washington, DC on Monday.
"We are here today to remind Donald Trump and to remind all those Republicans who support him and enable him, to remind every one of them that they can kick this agency, they can try to hold this agency down, they can try to starve this agency, they can try to tie up the people who work at this agency, but at the end of the day, they will not kill this agency," said Warren. "We will stay in this fight, and we will win."
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How You Can Help Save Boreal Forests in 2026
Want an easy New Years' resolution? Buy 100% recycled or alternative fiber toilet paper instead of rolls made from virgin forest pulp.
Jan 01, 2026
North America’s boreal forests are crucial for wildlife and the climate, but we’re literally trashing them to make pulp for toilet paper and other disposable paper products.
Companies are clear-cutting a million acres a year, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The northern boreal forests are Earth’s largest terrestrial biome. They’re the breeding grounds for 3-5 billion migrating birds that populate our backyards. And they’re a key carbon sink, storing 20% of global forest carbon and 50% of global soil carbon.
Studies show these forests have been overharvested and degraded to such a degree that the ecological damage will be difficult to reverse. They’re increasingly beset by global warming, melting permafrost, fires (including multi-year, spontaneously reigniting “zombie fires”), and pests, which threaten to destroy them and release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
If every American bought just one roll of toilet paper made from recycled paper rather than a conventional forest-fiber roll, it would save 1.6 million trees, 1 billion gallons of water, and 800 million pounds of greenhouse gases.
The United Nations recently warned of an approaching tipping point that could turn them from carbon sinks to carbon sources. That would be catastrophic. The recent COP30 climate summit, held in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, was billed as “the forest COP.” But its outcomes were dubious for tropical forests—and nonexistent for boreal forests.
But if climate delegates don’t protect them, consumers can—by buying 100% recycled or alternative fiber products instead of toilet paper made from virgin forest pulp.
A market for these alternatives is emerging. The US toilet paper industry is worth $42 billion, but a whopping 68% of US consumers surveyed want eco-friendly toilet paper made from recycled pulp, bamboo, or cornstalks.
If every American bought just one roll of toilet paper made from recycled paper rather than a conventional forest-fiber roll, it would save 1.6 million trees, 1 billion gallons of water, and 800 million pounds of greenhouse gases—the equivalent of taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year, NRDC found.
Eco-friendly toilet paper start-ups have a $1 billion toehold on the overall market so far—little more than 2%. But they’re growing fast. Imagine how many trees, how much water, and how many emissions we’d save if they gained a 68% share.
The big paper companies are imagining it, too. Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes Charmin, the top US toilet paper brand. This year it launched a bamboo version. That gives the company a green-sounding talk point, and a theoretical way into the growing alternative market. But it isn’t really available in stores and doesn’t do anything to change P&G’s bad practices.
It’s well documented that P&G makes regular Charmin by clear-cutting Canadian boreal forests for pulp, cutting down old-growth groves that have stood for a century or more. Only about 20% of these old-growth trees are left.
Any remnant wood left (called “slash”) after logging gets burned, and the land gets plowed and sprayed with glyphosate (RoundUp), eradicating formerly diverse ecosystems that caribou and birds depend on. They’re replaced with monoculture plantations of softwood trees planted in tight rows, worsening vulnerability to wildfires.
Yet P&G has the chutzpah to claim its slash-and-burn practices “absolutely prohibit deforestation” and “incorporate sustainability.” No wonder the company is being sued for greenwashing, with plaintiffs demanding it be held accountable for “egregious environmental destruction of the largest intact forest in the world” and making “false and misleading claims of environmental stewardship.”
Ultimately though, the power to change practices resides with consumers, not courts. Some 90 million Americans buy regular Charmin—and another 5 billion consumers worldwide buy P&G products. Collectively they have enormous power, provided they’re alerted to the problem and aren’t fooled by greenwashing tactics.
But if those conditions are met, consumers can save the boreal forests, one roll at a time.
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State AGs Sue Vought Over 'Unlawful' Scheme to Bankrupt Consumer Protection Bureau
"By refusing to fund the CFPB, even when legal and appropriate funding mechanisms are available, the Trump administration has sharpened its message that it does not care about affordability."
Dec 23, 2025
A coalition of attorneys general from across the US sued White House budget chief Russell Vought on Monday over his effort to completely starve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of funding, a ploy that—if successful—would eliminate a key path of recourse for Americans harmed by corporate abuses.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Portland, Oregon by the top law enforcement officials of 20 states—including New York, California, Maine, and Hawaii—and the District of Columbia. The suit notes that Vought, in his capacity as acting director of the consumer bureau, "has worked tirelessly to terminate the CFPB’s operations by any means necessary—denying plaintiffs access to CFPB resources to which they are statutorily entitled."
The attorneys general specifically challenge Vought's "unlawful" refusal to request CFPB funding from the Federal Reserve. Under the law that established the consumer bureau, the agency receives funding from the Fed rather than congressional appropriations.
Vought has advanced a tortured definition of "earnings" to argue the Fed lacks funds from which the CFPB can draw, leaving him with no choice but to allow the agency he and his far-right allies have long opposed to languish.
The new lawsuit argues that Vought's position violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the US Constitution. If allowed to stand, Vought's refusal to seek CFPB funds would "make it all but certain that the CFPB will run out of funding completely in January 2026."
California Attorney General Bonta said in a statement Monday that the Trump administration’s "latest effort to destroy the CFPB means that hundreds of thousands of consumer complaints will fall on deaf ears."
"By refusing to fund the CFPB, even when legal and appropriate funding mechanisms are available, the Trump administration has sharpened its message that it does not care about affordability, that it does not care to be on the side of families and working Americans," said Bonta.
The CFPB has been a target of big banks and other powerful corporations since its creation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The agency's success—it has returned more than $21 billion to consumers since 2011—has only intensified efforts by corporate-friendly lawmakers and right-wing bureaucrats to gut it.
Since taking control of the CFPB earlier this year, Vought has effectively shut down bureau operations and signaled a lax approach to enforcement.
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an architect of the CFPB, applauded the state attorneys general for taking legal action against Vought.
“The Trump administration’s latest illegal attempt to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will hurt families in every state across the country—and now states are fighting back," said Warren. "Today’s new lawsuit underscores how illegally starving the agency of funding would turn off the consumer complaint database that has helped millions of Americans at the end of their rope after getting scammed."
"If courts uphold the law," she added, "they’ll reject this attempt to sideline the financial cop on the beat that has returned more than $21 billion directly to Americans cheated by big banks or giant corporations.”
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