Four Senate Democrats want to know why years’ worth of public-facing information was scrubbed last month from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s website.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Andy Kim of New Jersey and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware pressed CFPB Acting Director Russ Vought, in a letter Monday, about the deletion of press releases, testimony, speeches and consumer advisories that pre-dated President Donald Trump’s second term.
“Your decision deprives Americans of key resources and is yet another giveaway to companies intent on scamming the public of their hard earned dollars,” the senators wrote, adding that they’re requesting additional information on purged records.
The agency noted in May that several hundred communications from before February 2025 had been archived but did not provide context or explanation.
“These deleted pages provided crucial information that helped Americans protect themselves against unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices — and also served as a repository of corporate predatory behavior,” the senators wrote. “You have erased a source of records of abusive corporate conduct that underpinned the CFPB’s decisions under prior Administrations to levy enforcement actions against those lawbreaking companies.”
The agency, which was previously tough on financial firms on behalf of consumers, has made an about-face since Vought took charge in February 2025, dismissing or terminating dozens of public enforcement actions and dismissing lawsuits.
Under Vought, the CFPB has published no new advisories for consumers, the senators noted. Deleted pages include an article about medical debt collection, an overview of predatory loan practices and a guide to protect vulnerable children from identity theft.
A spokesperson for the CFPB did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the senators’ letter.
Thirty-five supervisory highlights reports, which summarize the CFPB’s financial institution supervision, were also deleted from the agency’s website. While the Federal Records Act prohibits government agencies from getting rid of information internally without proper authorization, current CFPB employees have stated that the information deleted from the agency’s website “seems[s] to have [been] destroyed,” American Banker reported.
Also removed from the website, the senators noted, was the translation of web pages into non-English languages, making it harder for people to access information about predatory financial institutions and financial relief available to them, and making it more difficult to file complaints with the CFPB.
Though deleted information is available on an internet archive, the senators said, that is not a proper substitute for a government website because it is not a primary source and the website can be intermittently unavailable.
CFPB employees have speculated that the removal of hundreds of posts may be a tactic to “hide the agency’s accomplishments,” and may serve as another “step in them trying to shut it down entirely,” according to News of the United States, which the senators reference in the letter.
They request that Vought answer 15 questions on the mass deletions by July 2, including the reasoning behind the move and whether more deletions are planned.
Vought’s time at the CFPB may be coming to an end. Trump this month nominated Brian Johnson, a former CFPB deputy director, to run the agency. Johnson’s confirmation hearing has yet to be scheduled.
Job cuts Vought has pushed for during his tenure atop the CFPB remain tied up in litigation. A federal appeals court Friday denied the CFPB’s request for a quick decision on a plan to cut hundreds of bureau jobs.
