The future, they say, is the hardest thing to predict. With that caveat, what can we expect from a second Trump administration for consumer prediction? Some quick thoughts: President-elect Trump will surely ask CFPB Director Rohit Chopra to resign so that he can replace Chopra with someone he prefers. Despite the fact that Vice President-elect Vance has praised FTC Chair Lina Khan, it seems likely that a President Trump will designate another commissioner as FTC Chair and nominate someone for Khan’s seat as soon as he gets around to it.
Substantively, we can expect the next CFPB director to abandon many of Chopra’s current and recent initiatives. The next director can instantly rescind Chopra’s interpretive rules, like the ones governing buy now pay later transactions and earned wage access. To the extent that the CFPB has adopted notice-and-comment rules that fit within the Congressional Review Act lookback period, Congress, if Republicans capture the House, might invoke the CRA to block them from taking effect, as the last Trump administration did with the CFPB arbitration rule. The next CFPB director might also drop some pending CFPB enforcement actions, as happened the last time then-president Trump got to name a CFPB director.
I doubt the Trump administration would eliminate the CFPB altogether, even though Project 2025 calls for that. After all, that didn’t happen in the last Trump administration. But I wonder if they would do something that would have the same effect in the short term. Regular blog readers will recall that the industry is once more attacking the Bureau’s funding on the ground that the CFPB is funded by Federal Reserve earnings and the Fed is currently losing money. While no court has yet adopted the industry position, and two have rejected it, I’m not sure what would happen if the Trump administration bought into it. Presumably the Fed, an independent agency, could continue sending money to the Bureau but I don’t know what would happen if a President Trump–who has the power to fire the CFPB director–directed the Bureau not to accept it, or just instructed the director not to request funding. One thing I am confident in: it would be a mess.
Candidate Trump called for temporarily capping credit card interest at 10%. I very much doubt that that comes to pass. It wouldn’t surprise me if President Trump never mentions it again.
I think that a second Trump administration will be a very good time for predatory lenders. It is also likely to be a good time for for-profit schools, as was his last administration, and a bad time for student loan borrowers.
