In a post yesterday, Public Citizen reported that the government shutdown is placing crucial consumer, health, and safety protections at serious risk. The agency most impacted in the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where only 20 members of the 550-person staff are at work during the shutdown (working, but not being paid). For information about the […]
Author Archives: Allison Zieve
The following Federal Trade Commission services are NOT available during the shutdown: National Do Not Call Registry (For consumers) National Do Not Call Registry (For telemarketers) Consumer Sentinel Network (For law enforcement) Complaint Assistant (For filing consumer complaints) Identitytheft.gov (For consumers reporting ID theft) Econsumer.gov (For consumers reporting international complaints) Public comments can be submitted, […]
Today, in conjunction with a new study that details a host of concerning practices in apps targeted to young children, 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups (including Public Citizen) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the preschool app market. The groups' letter urges the FTC to hold app makers accountable for unfair and […]
The Partnership for Public Service issues an annual ranking of "Best Places to Work" in the federal government. The rankings are based on questions posed to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. This year, two agencies abut which we frequently blog declined in the rankings. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's score fell 25.2 points from […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is required by statute to prepare an annual report on student borrowers’ top complaints. In previous years, the CFPB has submitted the report to Congress in October. This year, it did not do so and has yet to do so. MarketWatch reports that "[t]The CFPB skipping the report isn’t a […]
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has not announced a formal policy denying [Federal Housing Administration] loans for DACA recipients, but lenders tell BuzzFeed News that’s the guidance they’re getting from officials. The BuzzFeed story is here.
I am very happy to report that the Department of Education is finally implementing its Borrower Defense rule, an Obama-era regulation intended to protect students from predatory colleges and universities. The rule requires the department to provide automatic discharges of federal loans to certain borrowers who cannot complete their programs of study because the borrowers’ […]
Patricia McCoy has written "Inside Job: The Assault on the Structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau." Here is the abstract: Soon after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President, while Republicans controlled Congress, opponents of the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) opened a campaign against the Bureau. Their target was less the […]
Politico reports that the Trump administration "for months concealed a report that showed Wells Fargo charged college students fees that were on average several times higher than some of its competitors." The “unpublished” report was obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information Act request. … The previously unseen analysis examined the fees associated with […]
CBS News reports on a new report that finds that the 2017 Equifax data breach was "entirely preventable." A 14-month congressional investigation slammed credit rating agency Equifax for lacking preventative measures in a data breach that exposed the personal information of 148 million Americans last year. According to the House report, hackers gained access to […]