The Trump administration has been trying since February to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But the bureau, created by Congress after the economic collapse of 2008, remained open by law.
Instead, this week, the administration plans to shut it down by another means: simply stop paying people. They have declared that the funding of the bureau is illegal and are taking this to court, where, with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, they are likely to win.
The collapse of 2007-2008 was a complicated collapse, but the short version was that large banks gave increasingly risky mortgage loans, and then packaged up that debt into collateralized bond-like investments, and sold those to investors as "safe." Meanwhile, they paid giant insurance companies to insure themselves against loss. So, when homeowners inevitably began to default on their mortgages, banks began to struggle, and made claims on their insurance, which put pressure on insurance companies, and soon, everyone was insolvent, and investors lost all their investment money. So, we had homeowners going bankrupt, banks insolvent, insurance companies insolvent, and investors losing vast amounts of money. Downstream, this resulted in millions of jobs lost and one of the worst recessions in history.
The CFPB was created after that, to keep that from happening again, or other schemes like it.
That's what Trump is shutting down.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/11/trump-administration-declares-cfpb-funding-illegal-00646354
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