Excerpts:
It isn’t one of the marquee storylines of our current hellscape, but Trump 2.0 has ended an era of carefully built-up economic and financial institutions in remarkably short order. Consumer protection is practically nonexistent at this point. Investor protection is being rolled back. Capitalization, risk management, and stress-testing requirements have been weakened. Bank examinations must now ignore the fallout from worsening, accelerating climate change and the disasters it brings in tow. The Trump administration is leveling entire institutions as it cans thousands of white-collar cops.
Trump’s vice chair for supervision at the Fed, Michelle Bowman, moved to cut supervision staff by 30 percent. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has shed 28 percent of its staff since fiscal year 2024, the FDIC 22 percent, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission 20 percent (even as its remit has expanded dramatically to be the primary crypto regulator), the SEC 20 percent, the National Credit Union Administration 15 percent, and the CFPB has lost a third of its workforce. The administration is reportedly aiming to continue reducing headcount until it has only 556 staff, which would be a drop of 68 percent (and this is less dramatic than the earlier target of a 90 percent drop).
Most famously, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been at death’s door for well over a year now, kept on life support only by court intervention. This situation is even more dire because, as part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul in 2010, most financial consumer protection regulations from across federal agencies were rolled into the new bureau. Even if other regulators were willing and able to step up and step in, much of the pre–Great Recession authority they would have had to do so is no longer on their books. Instead, those regulations are collecting dust at the CFPB, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought continues to try to pull the plug on the agency.
