Several Republican lawmakers renewed calls to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Wednesday with bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, has long opposed the agency, which was created through the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. He introduced a bill to defund the bureau in 2015, and again in 2023.
“The CFPB is an unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agency that has imposed burdensome and harmful regulations on American businesses, banks and credit unions,” Cruz said in a prepared statement alongside his reintroduction of the bill.
“It is an unchecked Obama-era executive arm and the Federal Reserve should not be transferring funds to it,” Cruz said. “Enacting this legislation would save American taxpayers billions of dollars, and I call on the Senate to expeditiously take it up and pass it.”
Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the CFPB’s funding structure, wherein it receives its appropriations through the Federal Reserve and not Congress.
But the Supreme Court decision, as it turns out, did not upend efforts to dismantle the agency by legislation. Cruz’s bill is co-sponsored by Sens. John Barrasso, R-WY; Rick Scott, R-FL; Steve Daines, R-MT; Marsha Blackburn, R-TN; Mike Rounds, R-SD; and Mike Lee, R-UT.
Rep. Keith Self, R-TX, introduced a companion bill in the house.
The CFPB declined to comment on the bill.
The consumer watchdog has long been the subject of Republican ire.
Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-NC, now-former chair of the House Financial Services Committee, told CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in December 2022 that under a Republican-majority Congress, “I think you’ll wish you tried harder to play by the rules.”
In November, Trump adviser Elon Musk posted on social media site X, which he owns, that the CFPB should be “delete[d].”
“There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk wrote at the time.
While banking trade group the Independent Community Bankers of America hasn’t called for an upending of the CFPB, its website says that it supports legislation that would replace single-director governance with a five-member commission.
“In recent years, despite being charged with ensuring consumer protections, the CFPB has put forth overly broad and destabilizing rules that have pushed consumers away from traditional banking,” Anne Balcer, chief of government relations and public policy for the Independent Community Bankers of America, said of Cruz’s reintroduced bill. “We look forward to working closely with Congress and the Trump Administration to advance reforms that support community banks and the customers they serve.”
