‘Screwed twice’: The CFPB says it’s looking out for consumers. Its own data tells a different story

‘Screwed twice’: The CFPB says it’s looking out for consumers. Its own data tells a different story Complaints about banks and other financial players keep rising as Trump officials squelch enforcement actions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Early in Donald Trump’s second term, his administration began ditching consumer protection lawsuits involving some of the nation’s biggest-name corporate players – including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway empire.

Under the command of Trump officials, the federal agency that had filed the suits – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – was signaling it no longer believed these companies were hurting everyday Americans.

As the CFPB abandoned these enforcement efforts, its own data began to tell a troubling story. In the year following the dismissals of the lawsuits, complaints against the vast majority of companies whose cases were dismissed increased – sometimes dramatically.

A Guardian analysis of CFPB data shows that across all banks and corporations named as defendants in the now-dropped suits, the number of complaints published to the agency’s public database shot up by more than 75%.

Of the 23 financial firms named as defendants, 17 saw increases in the number of complaints against them.

Complaints published to the CFPB database against Rocket Mortgage increased more than 130% in the year after the bureau dropped a lawsuit accusing its sibling company, Rocket Homes, of using kickbacks to steer borrowers to Rocket Mortgage.

Complaints against Branch Messenger Inc, which had been accused of working with Walmart to harvest more than $10m in unfair banking fees from the big box chain’s delivery drivers, shot up 315% in the year after the case was dismissed.

These increases are part of a larger trend of everyday Americans letting the CFPB know they have concerns about the way companies have treated them. Publicly posted complaints to the agency have grown from nearly 2.7m in 2024 to 6.3m so far this year.

Experts – and current and former CFPB employees – say the spike in complaints against companies freed from enforcement actions points to a disconnect between the bureau’s mission and its actions.

“Consumers are telling the bureau that there is an emergency, and the bureau is not listening or acting on that information,” said Erie Meyer, a former chief technologist at the CFPB who helped oversee the creation of its complaint database. “People are getting screwed twice: first by the company, second by the agency that’s supposed to stick up for them.”

The dismissals of enforcement actions are part of a wide-ranging campaign by the Trump administration to deplete or dismantle an agency created a decade and a half ago to counter the reckless and predatory practices that helped spawn the Great Recession.

Between mid-2012 and early 2025, the bureau publicly launched nearly 400 enforcement actions against banks and other financial firms – an average of roughly 30 a year, according to the agency’s website . These actions, the agency has previously said, helped provide aggrieved consumers more than $21bn in restitution and cancelled debts.

Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2025, the CFPB has launched just two public enforcement actions, its website indicates – one announced several days later and another brought in August 2025.

The current leadership of the CFPB did not reply to a detailed list of questions for this story. Instead, an agency spokesperson claimed in a statement that the CFPB had cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars – “making the American Dream, like homeownership, more costly by the thousands for each borrower”.

“This Weaponized agency attacked political enemies and disfavored industries and used novel legal theories and secret justifications to ruin lives and businesses,” the statement added. “We are fixing that and bringing the agency back to operating within statute and away from breaking the law and helping all business and Americans who were victims of thuggery.”

The Guardian’s reporting on the CFPB’s enforcement rollback came amid midterm elections that were in large part a referendum on the high prices Americans pay for gas, food and shelter. Last week’s results produced big wins for Democrats who lashed Trump for policies that fueled the rise in living costs.

The next battles over high prices and abusive business tactics may turn on how aggressive the midterms’ winners are in fighting to protect struggling consumers.

When Amanda and Jason Riffle got married in 2024, they struggled to find a place for their blended family of five. Rents around Clarksburg, West Virginia, were too high for the amount of space they needed, Amanda Riffle said.

After Jason’s family gave them a plot of land as a wedding gift, the couple went shopping for a doublewide manufactured home. They found what they wanted – a four-bedroom, 2.5 bath Southern Charm model. It was sold and financed by two companies that are part of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate: Clayton Homes and Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance.

Like many Americans who have sued, filed CFPB complaints or simply regretted their dealings with financial firms, the Riffles say that what they hoped to be a good thing for them turned out to be something else. In their case, they alleged in a lawsuit that Clayton and Vanderbilt sold them the doublewide using “bait-and-switch” tactics that raised their costs beyond what they had been promised.

The 2025 suit, filed in state court and later shifted to federal court, claimed the couple was promised that the price for the doublewide would be just over $250,000 – with installation costs included – but just before closing Vanderbilt increased the price to more than $290,000. They later learned that the market value of the Southern Charm model was between $180,000 and $200,000, according to the suit, which was settled on confidential terms.

“They show you one number, and then it changes,” Amanda Riffle said in an interview with the Guardian. “They really did rush us through everything: ‘You just need to sign here, you need to sign here.’ They did not go over those things in detail.”

Their lawsuit was filed just over three months after the CFPB walked away from its own lawsuit against Vanderbilt. The agency’s case, filed in federal court in Tennessee, alleged that Vanderbilt had made large numbers of loans on manufactured homes “without making a reasonable and good-faith determination that the borrowers could repay them”.

The CFPB’s claims were echoed by two other private lawsuits filed in federal court in West Virginia around the same time by Mountain State Justice, the non-profit legal aid group that handled the Riffles’ case.

Both of these lawsuits alleged Vanderbilt failed to realistically evaluate the affordability of the loans for financially unsophisticated borrowers.

One of these cases, which was also settled on confidential terms, alleges that the supposedly independent closing agent who helped oversee the signing of the documents on the plaintiffs’ loan was a former long-time salesman for Clayton Homes who falsely claimed that he was the mayor of a small West Virginia town, using an email address that included the moniker “THE MAYOR41”.

The other case, which is set to go to trial in December, claims that one of the borrowers was “handicapped and reads at only a kindergarten level”.

CFPB data reviewed by the Guardian shows that the number of consumer complaints filed against Vanderbilt increased by 39% from the year before the CFPB dropped the case to the year after – rising from 84 to 117 complaints over that time.

In a statement, Vanderbilt said it “originates more than 20,000 loans and services more than 165,000 loans each year. The number of CFPB customer complaints we receive is extremely low, and a change of 33 complaints over 12 months is extraordinarily small.” It said none of the complaints in that time led to requests from the CFPB to change its lending practices.

The company said its practices “exceed the legal requirements for assessing a borrower’s ability to repay a loan”. It said it considers borrowers’ “debt-to-income ratio” as well their “residual income”, even though the law only requires the use of one or the other.

In court records in West Virginia, Vanderbilt said it follows federal “truth-in-lending” rules and that it made no misrepresentations to borrowers. In the case set to go to trial, the company said it “repeatedly and accurately disclosed the terms of the loan”.

‘Failing to protect consumers’ Berkshire Hathaway, Vanderbilt’s parent, is not the only corporate conglomerate that the CFPB backed away from suing.

A month into Trump’s second term, the CFPB dropped a lawsuit against Rocket Homes, the sibling company of Rocket Mortgage, a leading home loan provider known for its heart-tugging Super Bowl commercials.

In a lawsuit in federal court in Michigan, the bureau claimed that Rocket Homes pressed real estate agents to steer home buyers toward Rocket Mortgage loans as part of a kickback scheme that discouraged homebuyers from shopping for the best deal. The lender charged higher rates and fees to borrowers who came to it through referrals via Rocket Homes, the lawsuit alleged.

This March, a year after the CFPB backed out of its case, an older American in Washington state complained to the agency that a banker had falsely promised them cash back for refinancing with Rocket Mortgage. Weeks after closing, the company told the borrower that the money had been “absorbed by closing costs”, according to the complaint narrative. The borrower wrote that his family had been “manipulated by deceptive information designed to entice us into spending thousands of dollars to refinance with Rocket Mortgage”.

Overall, complaints filed against Rocket Mortgage and published on the CFPB database more than doubled between the year before the agency dropped its Rocket Homes case to the year after – rising from 510 to 1,182.

Rocket said the agency’s claims against it “were baseless and the CFPB knew it”. It said Rocket Homes is focused on connecting home buyers “with top-performing agents based on objective criteria”.

“Any increase in complaints came as an obvious result of the increased size of the business,” the company added. “This year, a minuscule 0.040% of clients working with Rocket have filed a complaint.”

Three months after dropping the Rocket case, the CFPB backed off a lawsuit that alleged Walmart had forced its delivery drivers to use deposit accounts arranged through Branch Messenger, a tech company that administers a workforce payments and digital banking platform. These gig workers struggled to get access to their earnings and were forced to pay $10m in “junk fees ” to transfer their money away to other accounts, the CFPB claimed.