Federal financial watchdog ordered to cease activity

Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were instructed to cease “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” effectively stopping the agency’s operations, in an email from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, on Saturday evening.

Vought, who was confirmed this past week to lead the Office of Management and Budget, was on Friday named acting director of the consumer protection bureau, the federal government’s financial industry watchdog. In his email to staff Saturday, he reaffirmed earlier instructions from the previous acting director, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who last week ordered that staff should not issue any new rules or guidance and cease all investigations.

“As acting director, I am committed to implementing the president’s policies, consistent with the law, and acting as a faithful steward of the bureau’s resources,” Vought wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The agency, created by Congress in 2011 as a financial industry watchdog, cannot be closed without congressional action, but its director can freeze most of its actions by halting enforcement, weakening or repealing regulations and softening its supervision of banks and other lenders. The agency did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Saturday.

The agency has issued a number of high-profile regulations and enforcement actions over the years, seeking to strengthen safeguards on mortgages, credit cards, loans and other consumer finance. Most recently, the bureau sued Capital One in mid-January, arguing that the bank misled customers in promoting a high-yield savings account that it then kept at a near-zero interest rate.

In a Saturday evening post on the social platform X, Vought, an author of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for radically remaking the federal government, wrote that he had notified the Federal Reserve that the finance bureau “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.” (The agency is directly funded by the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional appropriations process.)

“The Bureau’s current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment,” he added in his post. “This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he said, using the agency’s initials.

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