The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has deleted at least 2,200 webpages from its website, a move advocates describe as part of the Trump administration's ongoing effort to dismantle the federal consumer finance watchdog. The removed content, all published before Trump's second term, includes press releases, consumer advisories, congressional testimonies, speeches, and blog posts, some dating back to 2010 when the agency was established.
Background on the CFPB's Creation and Mission
Congress created the CFPB after the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products, and compel companies to address consumer complaints. Since its inception, the bureau has returned over $21 billion to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found that the Trump administration's gutting of the bureau and its moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year.
Current Administration's Actions
Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the agency's abolition, ordered employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases, and attempted to fire most staff—a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce headcount from 1,174 to 556.
The webpage deletions, first reported by Bloomberg, are part of a larger plan to "undermine an agency that's helped people," said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform, noted, "This is a desire to delete the story of the CFPB up until now and to start telling a new story, that the CFPB is in the way of innovation and that the CFPB is hurting, rather than helping, consumers."
Analysis of Deleted Content
The Guardian compared the current CFPB website with versions archived by the Internet Archive's "wayback machine" and a mirror site created by a former employee. At least 2,228 posts dated September 17, 2010, through January 30, 2025, were deleted from the newsroom page. This is likely an undercount, especially for non-English content, as it only includes posts previously saved by internet users.
The removed content covers a wide range of topics: consumer advisories on home insurance cost surges, know-your-rights pages for veterans, CFPB directors' testimonies before House and Senate committees, and speeches by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who helped establish the CFPB. The most common topics were enforcement, mortgages, banking, and rule-making.
Reduced Transparency and Increased Partisanship
Since February 2025, only 16 posts remain on the newsroom page through March 2026, compared to 28 posts in December 2024 alone. The sparse posts are noticeably more partisan, focusing on rolling back previous regulations. For example, the first post after Vought took over announced the return of a six-figure penalty against a Chicago company for mortgage lending disparities, claiming the CFPB had abused its power. Other posts announce scaling back enforcement on payday lenders, reducing fines on an electronic money-services provider, and withdrawing a statement prohibiting citizenship status discrimination in lending.
"It's clear that this is not an administration that is listening to consumers, responding to their concerns, or addressing the issues that they raised," Feltner said. "It is primarily focused on the rollback of consumer protections that I think are making consumers and the economy less safe."
Removal of Language Accessibility Tools
The agency also removed tools for non-English speakers, including a filter to view news in nine other languages and a translation menu for Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. At least 129 posts in Spanish, three in Chinese, and one in Arabic were deleted. Advocates say this leaves limited-English speakers without access to important consumer advisories and complaint procedures.
"Limited-proficiency English speakers do get exploited and sometimes they do get exploited based on their limited English ability," said Chi Chi Wu of the National Consumer Law Center. This comes as consumer complaints reached record highs in Trump's second term—5.4 million in 2025, double the 2024 figure.
Broken Links and Archived Access
After the removals were reported, the CFPB added a link to an archived version of the newsroom page frozen in 2025. However, a Guardian review found several links to full press releases on that archived page were broken. Most deleted content is not available elsewhere on other agency or federal websites. "Removing it from a government agency site and saying, well, you can always find it in the archive or the 'wayback machine', that's a very different message that you're sending to consumers," Feltner said. "The government is no longer offering this information."
The CFPB did not respond to questions about the deletions.
