Amelia O’Rourke-Owens has written Tearing Holes in Consumer Protection, Democracy’s Safety Net. Or: 2-4-6-8, Dodd-Frank is pretty great! 3-5-7-9, policymakers must save the CFPB just in time! Here’s the abstract:
Financial protection laws safeguard all individuals regardless of wealth, race, or age. Indeed, they impact nearly every person living in the United States, as it’s impossible to participate in U.S. society without interacting with financial products or services. Consumer protection law offers extensive protections, and provides for a robust regulatory framework with numerous avenues for enforcement. Most recently, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act added critical structure and protections to the financial protection landscape, including the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Because financial protections are so impactful, government agencies and elected officials’ hostility towards consumer protection laws and enforcement is a useful bellwether for their prioritization of people’s interests over businesses’ immediate interests. The CFPB, the centralized federal enforcement agency of financial protection laws, was one of the earliest agencies the second Trump administration attempted to dismantle. I argue here that this assault on financial protection provides a useful way to operationalize the devaluing of individuals and the concomitant erosion of American democracy.
Because of the inevitable broadly-felt impact, the federal government’s curtailing of financial protection law in 2025 also presents an organizing opportunity. Consumer protection advocates have an opportunity to coalesce around a largely popular area of the law that impacts all residents of the United States. Advocates can shift away from the technical applications of financial protection law and instead highlight its influence on better economic futures for most people. Broader coalitions that leverage pro-democracy goals can organize with previously siloed movements, including voting rights and workers’ rights. Finally, contextualizing these attacks as an assault on the responsiveness to constituents’ needs may provide better clarity on the stakes at hand as well as viable solutions for opposition.
