Senate Democrats press CFPB’s Vought over mass deletion of records

Senate Democrats have accused Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) acting director Russell Vought of stripping away key consumer protection resources and obscuring past enforcement work in a letter sent on Monday. 

“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 lawmakers wrote. 

The lawmakers questioned the CFPB’s reliance on an external web archive to access older material, which may be effective at preserving some data, but makes navigating the website more difficult.  

“The CFPB’s website lists a vague acknowledgement of the removal of pages and directs users to an externally hosted archive to access deleted content. This archive is not a replacement for a federal government website,” they wrote.

The CFPB did not immediately reply to HousingWire‘s request for comment. 

The senators said the CFPB in May deleted thousands of pages published over the past 15 years — including all press releases, testimony and speeches that took place prior to President Donald Trump’s second term. The bureau also allegedly removed consumer advisories, notices of settlements, original research and major reports.

“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,” they 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.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) signed the letter. 

The letter ties the web purge to an enforcement pullback. Since February 2025, the CFPB has dismissed or terminated at least 42 public enforcement actions against Wall Street banks, big tech firms and other corporations, they added. 

The agency has been under the leadership of Vought for the past 16 months. During his tenure, Vought — who also serves as the current head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — has moved to scale back the bureau’s enforcement and regulatory activities.

Earlier this month, the White House sent the nomination of Brian Johnson to serve as permanent director to the Senate.

The Senators cited specific deletions. These include “a ‘know your rights’ article around medical debt collection and an overview of predatory practices associated with loans” and “all 35 Supervisory Highlights reports, which summarize the agency’s supervision of financial institutions and include anonymized descriptions of the supervisory actions from each administration dating back to 2012.”

They also criticized the removal of non-English content following a Trump executive order on English as the official language. 

“Ultimately, these deletions appear to be part of your ongoing effort to dismantle the CFPB,” they said. 

They asked Vought to answer a detailed list of questions by July 2, including whether the deletions were intended to “hide the agency’s [past] accomplishments” and whether removing explanations of past enforcement actions was “an attempt to hide the predatory conduct that Acting Director Vought is excusing by dropping almost all ongoing enforcement actions.”