President Donald Trump’s nomination of Stuart Levenbach to serve as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) represents a meaningful step toward reining in an agency that has, for more than a decade, drifted far beyond its statutory mission. While the move is widely understood as a procedural reset of the Vacancies Act clock, allowing Acting Director Russell Vought to continue leading the Bureau, the Southwest Public Policy Institute (SPPI) views this moment as both an opportunity and a warning.
The Trump Administration has begun the much-needed work of rolling back the damage left by Rohit Chopra’s tenure at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a period Lucas Parker aptly described as “a case study in regulatory excess and misplaced praise.” Under Chopra, the Bureau drifted far from its statutory purpose, expanding its authority into comparison-shopping tools, digital platforms, and routine financial products while stifling innovation and burdening consumers with higher costs.
As layoffs, shutdown plans, and internal reversals continue under Acting Director Russell Vought, it’s clear that many of Chopra’s most aggressive policies are collapsing under their own weight. The nomination of Stuart Levenbach represents another step toward restoring restraint, accountability, and a more coherent vision of consumer protection.
For years, SPPI has documented the CFPB’s excesses and failures — from data breaches that compromised the information of 256,000 Americans to punitive enforcement actions that raised costs for families, reduced access to credit, and targeted industries far outside the Bureau’s scope.
- “Hit the Brakes on Elizabeth Warren’s Beleaguered Bureaucracy” (Fox News)
- “Who’s Protecting Consumers from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?” (Fox News)
- “Trump Can Delete Elizabeth Warren’s Failed Experiment Once and for All” (Fox News)
- SPPI’s Bureau to Protect Financial Consumers campaign, launched after the CFPB’s massive data breach (Fox Business)
- “CFPB’s Latest Overreach Threatens to Nationalize Consumer Finance” (American Banker)
- “Products Such as Credit Karma and NerdWallet Benefit Consumers, Do Not Harm Them” (Fox Business)
Across this body of research and commentary, SPPI’s position has been consistent: A single, overpowered, unaccountable federal regulator harms consumers. But replacing it with fifty smaller, equally aggressive regulators may be even worse.
As the CFPB’s footprint contracts, SPPI has warned that the regulatory vacuum is not producing deregulation: it is producing fragmentation. State attorneys general and legislatures are racing to fill the void, creating a patchwork of conflicting, untested, and highly punitive rules that raise costs, slow innovation, and ultimately reduce consumer choice.
SPPI predicted this exact moment:
“The retreat of a single federal enforcer does not mean less regulation. It means something worse — the rise of fifty smaller CFPBs, each writing its own rules of the road.”
That prediction is now unfolding in real time. While the Levenbach nomination may stabilize federal leadership for the moment, states are accelerating—not slowing—their ambitions, with New York’s FAIR Business Practices Act expanding UDAAP-style authority far beyond federal norms, and states like Illinois, California, and Texas crafting bespoke rules on pricing, peer-to-peer payments, medical debt, small-business finance, and “junk fees.”
At the same time, state attorneys general are increasingly pursuing aggressive enforcement theories that even the old CFPB avoided, including lawsuits targeting product design and platform risk controls. This emerging “many-masters” landscape threatens to impose enormous compliance burdens and raise costs for precisely the consumers regulators claim to protect.
SPPI remains cautiously optimistic that new leadership at the federal level can halt the CFPB’s historically aggressive mission creep, restore the Bureau’s focus to genuine fraud and abuse, and reduce regulatory pressure on small lenders, fintech innovators, and the households living paycheck to paycheck.
However, we cannot ignore the trajectory at the state level: even a restrained CFPB will not shield consumers or industry from 50 different interpretations of what constitutes “abusive” or “unfair” conduct, 50 different enforcement priorities, and 50 different rulebooks governing fees, disclosures, underwriting, and product design.
For national financial providers and the consumers who rely on them, this is becoming one of the most chaotic regulatory moments in modern American history.
SPPI will continue to provide research, analysis, and accountability as the federal and state regulatory landscape evolves. Our goal remains unchanged: Protecting consumer access to credit and financial opportunity by promoting clear, consistent, pro-growth policy frameworks.
As the CFPB shifts leadership and state AGs ramp up their own agendas, SPPI will remain vigilant — advocating for policies that promote innovation, competition, and consumer freedom, not the fragmented and punitive structures emerging today.