Chart of the Day: Donald Trump Has Killed the CFPB

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was set up after the Great Recession to protect consumer finances. Republicans hated it from the start, and you can hardly blame them. After all, there are two sides to everything, and if you’re protecting consumer finances you must be protecting them from something. And that something is big banks and other financial corporations. Republicans don’t like it when their CEO pals are told that they have to treat their customers fairly or risk big fines.

Still, there was nothing Republicans could do about it once the CFPB was set up. Its funding comes from the Fed and its director is independent of Congress. But then Donald Trump was elected president. He couldn’t dismantle the CFPB or cut its funding, but he could install a new director who would simply decide not to bother opening any cases. So that’s what he did:

Do you feel safer now?

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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