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Chopra removed from consumer bureau post
Chopra posted a letter on X to President Donald Trump confirming that his “term as CFPB director has concluded.”
Rohit Chopra had led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since October 2021. | Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images
By KATY O'DONNELL
02/01/2025 10:30 AM EST
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra has been removed from his post, ending a three-year tenure where he angered the nation’s banks and technology giants by taking on everything from “junk fees” to Big Tech’s role in consumer payments.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who the interim director would be.
Chopra posted a letter on X to President Donald Trump confirming that his “term as CFPB director has concluded.”
“I know that the CFPB is ready to work with you and the next confirmed Director, and we have devoted a great deal of energy to ensure continued success,” Chopra wrote in the letter.
Republicans have criticized the consumer bureau, which they see as an unaccountable regulator with too broad a reach ever since it opened its doors in 2011. Chopra, a protege of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was an especially active regulator, and the next director is expected to reevaluate a flurry of rules and enforcement actions that he advanced on his way out the door.
Traditional conservatives and financial industry groups are pressing to rein in the agency’s powers, while economic populists could use the CFPB to advance their agenda with proposals like one Trump floated on the campaign trail to cap credit card interest rates.
Chopra was tapped by President Joe Biden in 2021 to revive the bureau after regulators in the first Trump administration sought to limit the agency’s scope.
Warren, who is credited with conceiving of the bureau when she was a law professor, issued a warning to the White House Saturday about any plans to try to “destroy the agency.”
“President Trump campaigned on capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent and lowering costs for Americans. He needs a strong CFPB and a strong CFPB Director to do that,” Warren said in a statement. “But if President Trump and Republicans decide to cower to Wall Street billionaires and destroy the agency, they will have a fight on their hands.”
There will be plenty for the next CFPB chief to review from Chopra’s tenure. The incoming director can immediately void informal policy guidance put forward by Chopra, including interpretive rules cracking down on Buy Now, Pay Later loan products, Earned Wage Access products allowing employees to access their paychecks ahead of time, and digital payments products.
But regulations that went through the formal rulemaking process are much harder to reverse.
Any rules issued since mid-August fall within the Congressional Review Act lookback window that allows lawmakers to introduce resolutions to overturn a regulation.
The CFPB has issued four major final rules since then: one capping overdraft fees banks can charge; one subjecting non-banks with digital payment platforms to greater scrutiny; one giving consumers greater access to their financial data; and another barring the inclusion of medical debt on credit reports.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) are already eyeing the overdraft and the medical debt rules as CRA targets. The CRA is the most thorough way to nullify a rule — it both invalidates the current regulation and precludes future administrations from introducing “substantially similar” proposals.
The next director can also move to undo Chopra rules without Congress, but it’s an onerous process. The agency would have to propose a new rule to repeal or amend an old rule — with the notice-and-comment requirements that come with formal rulemaking — and fashion a replacement that could withstand judicial scrutiny.
Agency officials could also decline to defend the rules in court. Banks have sued to stop the overdraft fee rule and the open banking rule, as well as an earlier one capping credit card late fees. A trade group representing credit reporting companies sued to block the medical debt rule, and tech trade groups have filed suit to challenge a rule cracking down on Big Tech’s involvement in consumer payments.
Still, the government’s refusal to defend a rule does not mean it is automatically scrubbed; other interested parties can step in to take up the defense, and a court has to find the rule to be unlawful in order to vacate it.
Since mid-October, the bureau has also taken enforcement actions against some of the most recognizable brands in the country. It has sued Apple and Goldman Sachs; Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo; Walmart; the credit reporting company Experian; the mortgage lender Rocket Companies; and another mortgage lender owned by Berkshire-Hathaway.
Trump was able to axe Chopra thanks to a 2020 Supreme Court ruling giving the president the power to fire the CFPB director at will. The high court last year ruled 7-2 that the agency’s funding stream — it draws money from the Federal Reserve, rather than annual congressional appropriations — is constitutional, batting down a challenge by trade associations.
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