Thanks to Trump, military members are unlikely to see the millions they’re owed

Earlier this month, as Republicans raced to get their “big, beautiful” billionaire tax cut package across the line, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was also making the rich richer. Russell Vought, who serves as acting director of the CFPB while simultaneously serving as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, quietly signed an order releasing Navy Federal Credit Union from its agreement to refund $80 million to U.S. service members over illegal fees.

Late last year, Navy Federal settled with the CFPB over allegations that it charged its customers surprise overdraft fees. The nation’s largest credit union — which reports $190 billion in assets and nearly 15 million members — was on the hook to stop charging these illegal fees, refund tens of millions to its customers and pay the CFPB a $15 million fine. With the stroke of a pen, the Trump administration said “never mind” and gave Navy Federal the green light to resume charging the fees.

Sadly, the unraveling of settled enforcement actions by the Trump administration is at this point nothing new. In May, Vought reversed a 2023 action against Toyota Motor Credit, inexplicably freeing the auto lender from paying out $48 million in redress over claims that it operated an illegal scheme to prevent borrowers from canceling products and services. The same month, payments company Wise received a nearly $2 million discount on the penalty it had agreed to pay for a range of misleading practices related to remittances; last week Wise settled with six states over deficiencies in its anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism compliance requirements.

That’s on top of the permanent dismissal of 22 other pending law enforcement actions that the agency had been litigating — including cases against megabanks such as Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Capital One — involving billions of dollars in consumer harm. It’s no surprise that companies are reportedly lining up to get their own corporate giveaways.

With limited exceptions, neither the CFPB nor any other part of the administration have explained to the public why a lawsuit gets tossed or a settlement erased. But at least five corporations that have benefited from the CFPB’s largesse — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Capital One, Walmart and Toyota — made hefty donations to Trump’s inaugural committee.

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Navy Federal’s pardon in particular stands out among these Trump-era moves, because it undercuts the new CFPB’s go-to excuse for failing to do its job. The agency has stated it will essentially refrain from enforcing rules related to payday lending, Buy Now, Pay Later loans and other similar practices, to instead focus on alleged harms to U.S. service members, veterans and their families. And yet, Navy Federal’s customer base is largely made up of — you guessed it — service members, veterans and their families.

Unfortunately, thanks to the Trump administration’s actions, members of our armed services are unlikely to see a penny of the millions they were owed. And as part of a move to fire nearly 90% of the CFPB’s civil servants — an action that has been halted by federal courts, for now — the agency’s leadership tried to wipe out the agency’s entire Office of Servicemember Affairs, a division staffed primarily by veterans and reservists that is dedicated to supporting and protecting members of the military in the consumer financial marketplace.

This begs the question: if it’s not protecting our service members and veterans, then what, exactly, is the Trump CFPB devoting time to?

The answer: not much. Though the administration’s attempts at mass firings are on hold, “the bureau has been mostly inoperable for nearly six months,” The Associated Press reports. “CFPB employees say they essentially spend the workday sitting on their hands, forbidden from doing any work by directive from the White House.” While the bureau’s work is frozen, attacks on consumers have not. The American Prospect reports that “2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011.”

Junk fees are back in vogue, thanks to the Trump administration and his allies on the Hill. Actions to cap gargantuan credit card late fees and bank overdraft fees, two rules that alone would have saved Americans $15 billion every year, have been thrown out in court or overturned in Congress. Republicans on Capitol Hill also overturned a CFPB rule on supervision of popular payment apps such as Venmo, PayPal and Google Pay for compliance with the law. A federal judge in Texas recently vacated a rule removing medical debt from credit reports after the Trump CFPB sided with lobbyists representing credit reporting giants such as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. The Trump administration suspended routine exams of banks and other financial entities — exams that ensure that they are following consumer protection laws on the books — earlier this year, and it’s unclear whether any have restarted.

And Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee, whose chairman, French Hill, has received more than $8 million in campaign donations from the finance, insurance and real estate industries during his career — held a hearing not to examine the Trump administration’s outrageous actions at the CFPB, but to retread tired attacks on the agency. This is despite the fact that the CFPB, during its short existence, has returned more than $21 billion to millions of Americans ripped off or scammed by companies and individuals that broke the law.

Fifteen years ago, in the wake of the financial crisis that decimated the U.S. economy, Congress passed the law that created the CFPB. Six months in to Trump’s second term, it’s clear that the corporations are back in charge. And your pocketbook is vulnerable.