For three and a half years, Lorelei Salas served as the supervision director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), America’s consumer financial protection watchdog. That means she was in charge of holding large financial institutions accountable for bilking consumers out of their money, and returning that money to the American people. Then, last March, she was forced out in the face of stop-work orders from Donald Trump.
Salas is one of many dedicated public servants who this administration has prevented from doing their jobs. During her years of service, she was instrumental in helping the CFPB accomplish its mission “to implement and enforce federal consumer financial laws, and to ensure that markets for consumer financial services and products are fair, transparent, and competitive.”
Sidelining someone like Salas is a slap in the face to the American people, and a betrayal of the agency’s mission of protecting American consumers from unfair and predatory practices. It serves no purpose and helps no one, except large corporations that will now face less accountability for any potential violations of the law.
Salas deserves better than this, and so does America. To understand how we got here, it’s worth understanding the history of how the CFPB came into existence, and why this administration chose to go to war against it.
The CFPB was set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from predatory practices by lenders and other large financial institutions. For a decade and a half, the CFPB did this work doggedly, winning back billions of dollars for American consumers and their families. It is one of the only government agencies that puts money directly back into Americans’ pockets. And over the years, it did so repeatedly.
Ultimately, between its inception in 2008 and the end of 2024, the CFPB helped recoup $19 billion for consumers, processed more than 5.6 million consumer complaints, and took more than 350 enforcement actions against offending companies. That’s real money back in people’s pockets; real accountability for large corporations; and real impact for families who otherwise would be left with little to no recourse.
Which is why it is such a travesty that the Trump administration is currently in the process of dismantling the CFPB.
As soon as Trump reentered office last year, he fired CFPB Director Rohit Chopra and installed his OMB Director, Russell Vought—the leading figure in Project 2025—as the agency’s acting director. Vought moved to hobble the agency, ordering that employees cease operations, and locking them out of their work buildings. At that time, Trump bragged: “We virtually shut down the out-of-control CFPB, escorting radical left bureaucrats out of the building and locking the doors behind them.” The administration also dropped a slew of high-profile CFPB lawsuits against some of the nation’s largest financial institutions.
The union representing CFPB employees sued to stop the shutdown, and a judge agreed with the employees, blocking the closure while the litigation proceeded. In the meantime, Vought tried to lay off most of the CFPB’s workforce, and was again blocked in the courts. Next, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel tried to drain the agency’s funding through a novel argument involving the Federal Reserve’s profitability, and was once again stopped in court. Legal experts closely monitoring the litigation expect a ruling later this year, with a potential showdown in the Supreme Court to follow.
In the meantime, just last week Vought moved to fire more than half the agency’s remaining workforce. As The New York Times reports, this is “a step back from the White House’s prior attempts to eliminate at least 90 percent of the bureau’s staff and shutter the agency … The new plan would gut significant parts of the agency but keep it intact, after a series of court decisions that blocked efforts to carry out mass firings.” This is what it looks like when a presidential administration goes to war against one of its own agencies, its workforce, and the Americans it serves.
People like Lorelei Salas and her colleagues embodied what it means to live a life of public service. She did the hard work of shielding Americans from predatory practices that they themselves often couldn’t see. As she herself has said, oftentimes people don’t even know that they’re entitled to a payout until an action from the CFPB results in a check arriving in the mail. That kind of work is invaluable, and if this administration succeeds in its war on the agency, we risk losing it forever.
We should listen to what Salas has to say, because she is exactly the kind of person that Trump and his cronies don’t want you to hear from. Her words are a warning.
Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.
