Minnesota AG challenges shutdown of CFPB

SAINT PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office joined another legal challenge Thursday against the Trump administration, this time in protest of the White House’s shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Ellison’s office filed an amicus brief in support of a suit led by the city of Baltimore, which argues that “consumers will be left without critical resources” now that the Trump administration has effectively frozen the CFPB’s work. 

At a Senate committee hearing on Thursday, Ellison testified that “without the CFPB, there is no one minding the store.”

“After all the economic tragedy that made this agency necessary, and all the amazing work it’s done to try to balance the scales of economic justice,” Ellison said, “it is outrageous to me that anyone calling themselves a public servant would be willing to shutter the CFPB.”

After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress established the CFPB through the Dodd-Frank Act to provide federal oversight of large banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. Through enforcement action and consumer complaint intake, the CFPB claims to have provided more than $20 billion in relief to consumers over the past 15 years and tallied an estimated 25,000 complaints per week from the public. Last summer, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra visited the University of St. Thomas for an event with federal and state officials, focused on tackling predatory lending practices targeting Minnesota’s Somali community.

Also, just days before Trump took office, the Minnesota Attorney’s Office had partnered with the CFPB in a lawsuit against a debt relief company. However, Ellison said the future of that ongoing lawsuit is now unclear.

“We got into the case with the idea that the federal government, through the CFPB, would be one of the co-plaintiffs. And now they’re simply not,” Ellison said. “So that puts all the people’s rights that we’re trying to protect with that lawsuit in jeopardy.”

The Trump administration has cited the CFPB as another example of government waste and moved quickly this month to fire Chopra and bring the work of the bureau to a standstill. That even included locking the doors of the Washington, D.C., headquarters.

“We virtually shut down the out-of-control CFPB, escorting radical left bureaucrats out of the building and locking the doors behind them,” Trump said. “What they were doing, was so terrible, where they were spending the money was so terrible.”

President Trump and some Congressional allies have suggested that states should be able to take on a greater share of enforcement in the area of consumer protection. 

However, Ellison and other DFL elected officials said the Attorney General’s Office, along with the state’s Commerce Department, do not have the resources or jurisdiction to tackle big banks like the CFPB did.

At a news conference after Thursday’s hearing, DFL Senator Matt Klein, who chairs the Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee, said he would be very protective of consumer protection funding in the state budget this session because of the CFPB’s uncertainty.

“We’ll certainly do our best, we take it as our mission and our creed to protect Minnesotans,” Klein said, “but we are out-resourced in this one.”