Warren, Warnock, Kim, Blunt Rochester Press Vought on Mass Deletion of CFPB Records

Warren, Warnock, Kim, Blunt Rochester Press Vought on Mass Deletion of CFPB Records

"Your decision deprives Americans of key resources and is yet another giveaway to companies intent on scamming the public of their hard earned dollars."

Text of Letter (PDF)

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ranking Member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) wrote to Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Russell Vought pressing for additional information on the deletion of almost 15 years of content from the CFPB website - including all press releases, testimony, and speeches published before President Trump's second term, as well as consumer advisories, notices of settlements on behalf of consumers, original research, and major reports. The Senators also asked for information on the steps that Acting Director Vought will take to restore access to deleted information that helps protect American consumers from financial predation.

"These deleted pages provided crucial information that helped Americans protect themselves against unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices-and also served as a repository of corporate predatory behavior, " wrote the Banking Committee Democrats. "You have erased a source of records of abusive corporate conduct that underpinned the CFPB's decisions under prior Administrations to levy enforcement actions against those lawbreaking companies."

Under the Trump Administration, the following consumer protection resources have been removed from the CFPB website:

• "A "know your rights" article around medical debt collection and an overview of predatory practices associated with loans."
• "(A)ll 35 Supervisory Highlights reports, which summarize the agency's supervision of financial institutions and include anonymized descriptions of the supervisory actions from each administration dating back to 2012."
• "(I)nformation for regulators reviewing bank mergers, a guide to protect vulnerable children from identity theft, and information about the CFPB's largest-ever distribution from the victims relief fund as a result of enforcement actions against predatory credit repair companies."
• "(T)ranslations of website pages into non-English languages… introducing additional barriers to accessing information for millions of Americans."

In addition to removing information critical to the protection of American consumers, the CFPB, under Acting Director Vought, has also erased numerous records of abusive corporate conduct from its website, after dismissing or terminating at least 42 public enforcement actions against Wall Street banks, Big Tech firms, and other corporations favored by the Trump Administration.

"Ultimately, these deletions appear to be part of your ongoing effort to dismantle the CFPB… by effectively deleting 15 years' worth of information generated by the CFPB, you are cutting off a secure and trustworthy source of knowledge for millions of people, including consumers, private sector and government employees, and regulators," concluded the Senators.

The Senators requested answers from Acting Director Vought to assess the impact of the CFPB's mass deletion of data by July 2.

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