Consumer Protection

Consumer Federation of America and Student Borrower Protection Center Issue Joint Memorandum on Trump-Led CFPB Pardons of Repeat Offender Corporations

In the six weeks following the Acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Russell Vought’s stop work order, he and Trump have doled out ten corporate pardons worth over $3 billion dollars to Wall Street banks, predatory lenders, and their wealthy executives. Seven of these pardons were provided to repeat offender corporations who have a track record of breaking the law and have already paid out nearly $7 billion as a result of CFPB and other regulators’ enforcement actions.

These Trump-led CFPB pardons include chronic repeat offenders Wells Fargo and Bank of America, who hold the record for the highest fines and most enforcement actions from the CFPB. Along with repeat offender JPMorgan Chase, these banks were facing damning evidence that, through the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app Zelle, Americans lost nearly $1 billion due to fraud—until Trump let them off scot free. This trio of repeat offenders accounts for a significant percentage of the $21 billion the CFPB has forced banks and lenders to return to consumers over its lifetime.

The corporate lawbreakers in this memo have chosen to persist in their illegal conduct rather than clean up their act to stop cheating consumers. This memo identifies repeat offenders subject to CFPB enforcement actions that were pending when the Trump administration took over the CFPB, including their rap sheet, organized by the status of their Trump-administration pardon.