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 […]
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The vaping industry's First Amendment challenge to FDA e-cigarette marketing rules remains pending in the DC Circuit, where it awaits decision following oral arguments this past September. But federal officials aren't the only ones trying to regulate the industry's practices: States also regulate vape shops operating within their jurisdictions. And last week, state regulations also […]
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 The “unpublished” report was obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information Act request.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 […]
Yesterday Public Citizen issued a new report on the Department of Education’s mismanagement of the TEACH Grant program. The report is based on more than 2,400 pages of records we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, most of which we released for the first time yesterday. The report paints a dire picture of […]
At this point, it should come as no surprise to read about mobile app tracking users and selling the data. But an article in today's New York Times still makes for interesting and disturbing reading. The article explains that – At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location […]