Public protections · consumers
Consumer financial protection enforcement, by president
Enforcement actions per year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that polices banks, lenders, and debt collectors for fraud and abuse. It was created in 2011, so there is no figure for Clinton or Bush. By the bureau's own listing, the three presidencies before 2025 filed at broadly similar rates, about 25 to 31 actions a year with wide swings from one year to the next. Then, in 2025, a near-total shutdown: two actions in the 21 months since.
Enforcement counts reflect policy, budgets, and the courts, not one office alone. The CFPB's activity is a proxy for how actively consumers are protected from financial abuse, not a direct measure of harm prevented. A count is also blunt: one action can return billions of dollars to consumers and another a few thousand, and the year-to-year swings partly reflect litigation over the bureau itself, including the funding challenge the Supreme Court rejected in May 2024. The 2025 collapse reflects an administration decision to halt the bureau's work, which remains in litigation as of August 2026. The bureau genuinely did not exist before 2011, which is why Clinton and Bush show no figure rather than zero. Trump II is a partial term.