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.
In addition to the mass deletion of posts, the CFPB’s newsroom page is also being updated less frequently. Only 16 posts remain from February 2025 through March 2026.
In comparison, in December 2024, the last full month before Trump began his second term, the CFPB published 28 posts. These included a speech by former CFPB director Rohit Chopra on how the bureau could crack down on data brokers who sell sensitive personal information to scammers, a press release about a lawsuit the CFPB brought against three of the country’s biggest banks for allowing fraud on peer-to-peer payment apps like Zelle and Cash App, and an announcement that the agency is distributing $1.8bn back to more than 4 million consumers who were charged illegal fees by two credit-repair companies.
2,228 articles in the CFPB website’s newsroom section have been deleted. Only 18 remain, all published after February 2025
Guardian graphic. Source: Internet Archive
Advocates say the lack of public posts signals both a break from previous agency leaders’ track record of transparency and how out of touch Trump’s administration is with consumer needs.
“It’s clear that this is not an administration that is listening to consumers, responding to their concerns, or addressing the issues that they raised,” Feltner said. “It is primarily focused on the rollback of consumer protections that I think are making consumers and the economy less safe.”
The sparse posts are noticeably more partisan and overwhelmingly about the rollback of previous regulations and policies.
The first post after Vought took over the agency announced that the CFPB would return a previous “six-figure financial penalty” it had levied against a Chicago-based company because of its racial disparities in mortgage lending. The post says “CFPB abused its power” by running a “redlining screen” and used “radical ‘equity’ arguments” to bring down the company.
Other posts announce the scaling back of enforcement of regulations on payday lenders; a reduction of fines levied – from $2m to $45,000 – on an electronic money-services provider that misled consumers about its fees; and the withdrawal of a statement prohibiting creditors from using an applicant’s citizenship status in lending decisions.
Removing language accessibility while consumer complaints skyrocket
The agency also removed several tools for non-English speakers to access the site, including a filter to view news posts in nine other languages and a menu at the top of the CFPB website that translated it into Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic and Haitian Creole.
Advocates say this means important consumer advisories and webpages about how to file consumer complaints – about how people have been harmed and can potentially get financial relief – will no longer be accessible to non-English speakers.
A Guardian analysis found that at least 129 posts in Spanish, three posts in Chinese and one in Arabic were deleted.
“Limited-proficiency English speakers do get exploited and sometimes they do get exploited based on their limited English ability,” said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting and data advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, which is also a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit brought by the bureau’s staff union.
This comes as the volume of consumer complaints, about anything from errors on credit reports to violations of fair debt collection laws, have reached the highest levels in the agency’s history during Trump’s second term. A record 5.4m complaints were submitted in 2025, double the number in 2024, according to a Guardian analysis of CFPB complaint data.
Broken links
Since the removals were first reported two weeks ago, the CFPB has added back a way for users to access some of the deleted pages. A note at the top of the newsroom page includes a link that redirects users to a version of the news releases page frozen in time last year.
As of publication, the site says, “news items published before February 2025 can be found in the archives”.
However, a Guardian review of the archived page, hosted by a third-party vendor, found that several links to the full press releases were broken. Most deleted content is not available elsewhere on other agency or federal websites.
“Removing it from a government agency site and saying, well, you can always find it in the archive or the ‘wayback machine’, that’s a very different message that you’re sending to consumers,” said Feltner.
The message now, says Feltner, is more like “the government is no longer offering this information”.
Methodology
The Guardian used the Internet Archive to check for all webpages under consumerfinance.gov. We found more than 5,000 URLs after cleaning the results for duplicate pages. We filtered for pages under the newsroom directory, where the bulk of deletions has happened, and checked to see whether each webpage was still online. After confirming the statuses, we collected the original pages from the Internet Archive, and performed an analysis on the content of each individual page.
The Guardian’s “Deleted data” series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or re-create lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at deleted-data@theguardian.com.
