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.

Many consumers across the nation disagree.

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.

The White House did not reply to questions for this story.

‘Bait and switch’

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.

Complaints against Branch published to the agency’s database increased from 46 the year before the case was dismissed to 191 the year after.

Dozens of Uber drivers, for example, filed complaints with the CFPB against Branch. Many described being locked out of Uber Pro Card accounts, set up through the tech firm, where their earnings had been deposited. “I worked to earn that money,” one driver wrote to the CFPB three months after the agency’s lawsuit was dismissed. “Branch has the money. I can not access my earnings and they seem content to keep the money and let me starve.”

Walmart, Branch and Uber did not respond to questions from the Guardian.

The agency also dropped a lawsuit that accused three of the nation’s top banks – JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – of failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud on Zelle, a well-known digital payment service partly owned by the three banks.

CFPB alleged the banks – and Zelle’s operator, Early Warning Services – pushed Zelle to market without effective consumer safeguards against fraudsters. The agency’s lawsuit claimed that failure led to more than $870m in customer losses.

In the year after the case was abandoned, CFPB saw a spike in complaints about a variety of concerns involving JPMorgan (up 19%), Wells Fargo (up 26%) and Bank of America (up nearly 33%).

The three banks declined to comment. An Early Warning spokesperson called the CFPB’s suit “meritless” and claimed it “sought to shift blame to Zelle for criminals’ actions”. The suit, the spokesperson added, “wrongly portrayed Zelle fraud countermeasures as ineffective, even though more than 99.98% of Zelle transactions are without report of fraud or scam”.

In a report published in March, the CFPB said that many of the enforcement actions that it dismissed “constituted agency overreach” and “should never have been undertaken”.

‘Almost crying’

The CFPB was born in 2011, in the ruins of economic catastrophe. Predatory loans fueled by Wall Street money ignited a meltdown that destroyed hundreds of banks and spawned millions of job losses and home foreclosures. The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission laid much of the blame on a jumble of federal agencies that did little to stop these practices.

As the CFPB would later say: “It became clear that the nation needed a financial regulator solely focused on looking out for consumers.”

From the start, the new agency viewed publishing regular consumers’ complaints as an essential transparency tool.

“This is the only place where you see a granular-level description of what’s actually happening to people,” Meyer said. The database was designed to be “public by default” because “we don’t want to wait until it’s front page news – or financial institutions snapping the economy in half – before we catch these problems.”

Not everyone appreciated the bureau’s work.

The authors of Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for Trump’s second term, called for the CFPB’s destruction, describing it as a “highly politicized, damaging and utterly unaccountable federal agency”.

Trump claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025. But soon after he returned to office, he appointed Russell Vought, a key architect of the plan, as acting director of the CFPB and fired Rohit Chopra, who had been the agency’s director during the Biden administration and was known as an advocate for aggressive enforcement.

Trump told reporters that the agency “was a very important thing to get rid of”. He claimed he had gotten calls from “lending officers” and “owners of small banks” who were “almost crying” because they had been put “out of business” by the agency.

The White House did not reply to a request from the Guardian to describe the circumstances of the calls and identify which financial institutions, according to Trump, had been driven out of business.

Under Vought, the agency tried at one point to lay off nearly 90% of its workforce and moved to slash its own funding, but was blocked by federal court rulings on both fronts.

Vought, who is Trump’s budget director, did not reply to questions about his time running the agency.

Recently the agency has made it more difficult for consumers to find out about complaints against financial firms. In August it announced that it would no longer publish consumer complaint narratives, which it said “present only one side of an issue”. Soon after, it removed millions of these consumer experiences from its online complaint database.

The public can no longer search the database and quickly see the experiences of consumers who say they have had problems with specific companies. Instead, they must download enormous complaint files from the CFPB’s website and sort them manually.

Meyer, the former CFPB official, said stripping away complaint narratives “is an unconscionable waste of time and effort and money”.

“We built this complaint system so we would never again get to a place where people would be flying blind about what’s happening to people who are white-knuckling their spot in the middle class,” she said.

‘Not listening’

Along with dropping enforcement cases against more than 20 companies, the CFPB has also pulled back on multiple issues that are big worries for many Americans. For example, it has deprioritized scrutiny of digital payments, student loans and medical debt.

Explaining its shifting priorities, the agency has said it aims to focus on “tangible harms” and “pressing threats to consumers” – “particularly service members and their families, and veterans”.

It also announced it would no longer focus on enforcing truth-in-lending laws in connection to “buy now, pay later” loans, an expanding corner of the US credit market. These loans, sometimes known as BNPLs, spread out purchases and bill payments over several interest-free installments. Consumers often use them to buy clothing, smartphones and even groceries or cover rent and car repairs.

The nonprofit National Consumer Law Center has reported that BNPLs can sometimes be a reasonable alternative to paying up front or using a credit card, but they often come with late charges and other fees that can turn “what looks like free financing” into “a high cost loan”.

In the year after CFPB announced it was pulling back on watchdogging these transactions, published complaints to the agency about some of the industry’s largest players grew significantly. Klarna, a BNPL provider headquartered in Stockholm, saw a 382% jump – from 290 published complaints to the agency in the year before compared with 1,398 in the year after.

Jennifer Zhang, a policy, research and data analyst at the non-profit group, Protect Borrowers, said the agency’s pullback on BNPLs sends a signal that even if consumers are sounding the alarm about abusive practices, “the CFPB is not listening”.

A Guardian review of agency data also shows that its retreat on BNPLs may conflict with its promise to protect service members and veterans.

Complaints filed by these groups against some of the biggest BNPL companies generally grew at a higher rate than complaints by other types of consumers, CFPB data show. Current and former service members’ complaints against Klarna, for example, increased 465%.

At the same time, complaints filed by service members and veterans have increased against many of the companies whose CFPB enforcement suits were dropped by the Trump administration. This includes an 135% increase – from 64 to 151 year over year – in service member and veteran complaints against Rocket Mortgage.

Klarna did not respond to questions from the Guardian. The BNPL industry’s leaders insist they have strong safeguards in place to protect consumers. Some say they factor borrowers’ repayment histories in lending decisions.

‘Unsustainable’

In early 2023, the Biden-era CFPB teamed up with New York attorney general Letitia James in a lawsuit alleging that a top subprime auto lender, Credit Acceptance Corporation, had soaked car buyers with hidden costs and high-interest loans they couldn’t afford.

When Trump took office, the bureau swiftly ended its partnership with New York state and withdrew from the suit.

In the year following CFPB’s withdrawal, complaints about the lender continued to stream into the agency, describing many of the same issues the suit sought to address. In all, complaints against Credit Acceptance increased by 34% – from 2,722 to 3,652.

In July a customer from Pennsylvania wrote that they had been charged an inflated sales price based on a slew of fees and financed add-ons. “I believe this is the exact type of lending practice that consumer protection laws are intended to prevent,” the consumer wrote.

In September, James announced a $700m settlement with Credit Acceptance that included her state as well as 39 other states and Washington DC.

The company did not answer questions for this story. It noted in a statement on its website that the settlement “was reached without any admission of fault or wrongdoing”. The statement said that policies and practices required under the agreement “are broadly consistent with our focus on customers and our mission of changing lives” and “do not fundamentally alter the company’s business model”.

The CFPB did not answer a question from the Guardian about the case, either. It has previously said that it wants to leave many enforcement and supervision priorities to state agencies.

But consumer law experts say that states often do not have the resources or reach to carry out a truly national strategy to challenge questionable practices at the nation’s most powerful companies.

‘The most vulnerable Americans’

In the wake of the historic results in the midterm elections, some Democrats will seek to reverse the CFPB’s enforcement rollback and push to re-establish it as a national leader in fighting unfair financial practices.

In written statements, Representative Bill Foster of Illinois and Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada told the Guardian they plan to aggressively scrutinize what has happened at the CFPB since Trump returned to office.

“Next Congress, my colleagues on the Financial Services Committee and I will investigate the unconstitutional dismantling of the CFPB,” Foster said, adding that he and other committee members will pursue “subpoenas, investigations, hearings, and, ultimately, legislative action to restore consumer protections in this country and hold accountable those who seek to profit off the most vulnerable Americans”.

The Senate will also decide whether to approve Trump’s pick to replace Vought, who left his position as the CFPB’s acting director in August. Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Brian Johnson, served as its deputy director during the first Trump administration.

More recently, he has been a vice-president overseeing credit card compliance at Capital One, which is among the companies whose CFPB lawsuits were dropped by the agency.

The case, which accused Capital One of misleading some customers about interest rates on saving accounts, was withdrawn a month after Trump’s inauguration. The number of public complaints to CFPB about a variety of concerns about Capital One rose from 27,193 in the year before the case was dismissed to 29,646 the year after, a 9% increase.

Capital One did not reply to questions from the Guardian. Johnson has agreed to recuse himself from any CFPB action related to Capital One for two years if he is confirmed.

Austin Hinkle, a former senior counsel and section chief at the CFPB, said that along with investigating “corporate pardons” received by companies sued by the agency, Congress should also look at the administration’s push to cut or erase financial penalties in already completed enforcement actions.

In one case in 2025, CFPB officials went back to court to ask a judge to allow them to refund a $105,000 penalty paid by an Illinois mortgage company accused of racial discrimination. The judge denied the request.

In another case, Trump officials reopened a settlement with a major money services business, Wise US Inc.

In January 2025, 10 days after Trump’s inauguration, the CFPB had announced that Wise had agreed to resolve allegations it had misled US customers about its ATM fees and failed to properly disclose other fees. (Wise did not admit or deny the agency’s findings.) Along with roughly $450,000 in consumer refunds, the agreement required Wise to pay a $2.025m fine.

The resolution of the case was the last major enforcement action handled by CFPB before Trump appointees took over. The consent order was signed by Rohit Chopra, Biden’s CFPB director. Trump fired him the next day.

Four months later, the agency revealed that it had renegotiated its deal with Wise.

A new signature appeared in looping blue script on the updated version: Chopra’s replacement, Russell Vought.

The new agreement lowered Wise’s fine – from $2.025m to $44,955.

• Mariama Eversley contributed reporting