The Guardian – The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau deleted at least 2,200 webpages from its website last month, a move advocates say is part of the Trump administration’s latest effort to dismantle the federal consumer finance watchdog. The removed content was all published before Trump’s second term, and includes press releases, consumer advisories, congressional testimonies, speeches and blog posts. Some of the material dates back to as early as 2010, when the agency was formed. “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,” said Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform. He previously worked at the CFPB as a policy adviser to senior leadership and left in December of 2025. The webpage removals come as the Trump administration has been actively trying to shut down the agency over the past year. Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the abolition of the agency. He has since ordered CFPB employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff, a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556. The deletion of the bureau’s website content, which was first reported by Bloomberg, is just the most recent 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, a non-profit consortium of consumer rights organizations. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of 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 engage with consumers when they file complaints. Since its inception, the bureau has returned more than $21bn to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year. “[The CFPB have] rebalanced the odds between big banks and regular people,” Rust said. “But industry doesn’t like the mission, and Russell Vought has implemented their wishes to undermine it.” The CFPB did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about why the webpages have been deleted.

‘This is not an administration that is listening to consumers’ To count how many webpages were deleted, the Guardian compared the current version of the CFPB’s website with versions captured on the Internet Archive’s “wayback machine” and a mirror CFPB website, created by a former CFPB employee, that preserves all webpage content from before February 2025. At least 2,228 posts dated 17 September 2010 through 30 January 2025 were deleted from the website’s “Newsroom” page, according to the Guardian’s analysis. This is likely an undercount, particularly for non-English content, because it only counts posts that have previously been saved by internet users. The removed content spans a wide range of formats and topics, from consumer advisories about what to do when your home insurance costs surge and know-your-rights pages for veterans, to CFPB directors’ testimonies before the House financial services and Senate banking committees, which directors are required to give twice a year. (Vought appears to have skipped both so far.) Several speeches made by the senator Elizabeth Warren, who helped establish the CFPB, are also gone. Overall, the most common topics addressed in the deleted posts were enforcement, mortgages, banking and rule-making, according to a Guardian review of the metadata on the archived posts.