If ever you needed proof that it’s the Biden administration looking out for the little guy, while Trump looks out for himself and his wealthy donors, look no further than the right-wing attacks on the CFPB’s efforts to protect Americans from predatory lending practices.
The Washington Post makes clear that the Trump administration wanted lenders to be able to make expensive loans to low-income borrowers that they could not afford to repay.
The dispute began in 2017, when the watchdog agency issued rules preventing payday lenders from offering expensive loans to low-income Americans who could not afford to pay the money back. Under President Donald Trump, the agency later eliminated some of those protections, but payday lenders still pressed forward with a lawsuit, which came to hinge on the bureau’s unique funding structure.
Last week, the Supreme Court handed the CFPB a big victory. It ruled that the bureau’s funding is constitutional, “denying opponents a ruling that could have invalidated much of the CFPB’s past work,” The Post reported.
Of course, the lenders are not letting up on efforts to line their pockets with money from the poor. They’re giving a good chunk of that dough to Republican campaigns, including Trump’s, “in the hopes of securing a more friendly regulatory environment,” as The Post put it.
In the meanwhile, CFPB is proceeding with its work to protect vulnerable Americans.
More from The Post:
To start, the CFPB hopes to begin implementing its long-delayed payday lending rules, which sparked the Supreme Court case. The regulations are narrower than first envisioned: They primarily would prevent payday and car-title lenders from trying to withdraw money repeatedly from customers’ bank accounts.
The policy aims to protect cash-strapped borrowers from multiple failed payments, which carry the risk of costly bank overdraft charges. But the exact date when the rules will take effect is unclear, since payday lenders signaled Thursday they planned to challenge the government again in federal court.
The CFPB also plans to resume work on at least 14 known lawsuits and investigations that have been stalled in the face of legal uncertainty, according to senior agency officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their strategy. Some of the targeted companies had ties to the Supreme Court challenge against the CFPB — and later leveraged it to secure temporary relief in their own court fights.
The cases primarily involve short-term lenders and other companies that allegedly profited after levying large fees on their customers, including military service members and poor families.
