The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was one of the early targets of the Trump administration’s attempts to dramatically reduce government spending. The bureau’s work was first suspended in early February, and legal wrangling has continued since — which experts say has created an uncertain future for many CFPB efforts to protect consumers.  

A federal judge scheduled a two-day hearing, starting Tuesday, in a case about the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the CFPB. In March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked the administration from firing 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees, and struck down a stop-work order targeting the bureau.

Recently released court records include declarations from CFPB staff stating that the firings will hobble the agency’s ability to carry out tasks including supervising banks, maintaining the consumer complaint database and providing oversight and enforcement of mortgage and credit fair lending laws. 

The hearing aims to help determine how many employees the agency needs to fulfill what it is required to by law.

Mark Paoletta, acting chief legal officer of the CFPB, said in a court filing that the agency should be pared back to about a 200-person staff that can “fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy.”

The Trump administration’s attempts to hobble to CFPB have created uncertainty about the agency’s work for consumers and companies.

“The biggest challenge for innovators in financial services is the lack of clarity regarding the regulatory structures in which they have to abide and live,” said Phil Goldfeder, CEO of the American Fintech Council, a standards-based trade association.

The CFPB was created in the aftermath of the financial crisis to establish a single agency responsible for enforcing consumer protection laws. It took over the supervision of consumer products from other bank regulators.

Those won’t be picking up work the CFPB had been doing; it “just won’t be done, or will be done much less,” said Ian Katz, a managing director at Capital Alpha Partners, a policy research and political forecasting firm. 

In recent years, the CFPB has moved to cap bank overdraft fees, regulate payment apps and resolve consumer complaints. Now many of those efforts have been overturned or left in doubt. 

Under the Trump administration, the bureau has also been dropping lawsuits it previously filed. These include a case against National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts related to improper debt collection practices against private student loan borrowers, and a suit against Early Warning Services, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle fraud.

“There is a risk that this could go badly,” said Katz. “It’s not like they’re taking a 20% cut of the personnel or a 15% and people say, ‘Well, we might lose a few things here and there, but basically, we’ll be okay.’ It will be a vastly different animal and I think there’s no avoiding that.”

The CFPB did not respond to requests for comment.

Here’s what experts expect could happen with some CFPB rules and programs.

Bank overdraft fee caps were scheduled to go into effect in October 2025, but Congress is now in the process of overturning the rule. Analysts expect banks to compete on keeping fees low. “I don’t think they’re going to immediately rush to raise them because of that competitive aspect,” said Katz.

The CFPB had also moved to require that nonbank firms offering financial services like payments and wallet apps follow the same regulations as banks. That is no longer going to happen — lawmakers voted to overturn the rule and President Donald Trump has indicated he will sign it.

As a result, “some payment apps are going to be supervised, and other ones won’t,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America. 

Zelle, which is a bank product, will still fall under bank regulations, he said, but fintech firms such as Paypal, Venmo and Block’s Cash App, will be “be able to evade that” oversight.

It’s also unclear how effective the CFPB will be at resolving consumer conflicts. The CFPB is required by law to maintain a database of the consumer complaints and receives an estimated 25,000 complaints each week.

In 2023, the CFPB received more than 1.6 million consumer complaints, according to its annual report.

The complaints are shared with the companies for a response, but consumer advocates worry without strong enforcement behind it, the database will lose its effectiveness.

“If there is a complaint and it’s received, that doesn’t mean that there will be a response, it will just potentially sit there in the queue,” Rust said. “So if you’re a consumer, you thought you did what you should, to seek someone to help find a remedy. But in fact, nothing’s happening.”

State attorneys general from 23 states have come out against the administration’s efforts to defund the bureau. In a court filing in February, they said that referrals of consumer complaints to the CFPB have been left in limbo, communications about enforcement investigations are lacking and direct inquires from the AG offices to the agency have gone unanswered. 

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The Department of Homeland Security restored the legal status of thousands of international students who had their visas revoked, according to reports Friday.

College experts largely applauded the move, which was prompted by court challenges and lawsuits filed by affected students and their lawyers, as a win for students and higher education overall, but the gains could be short lived.

The Trump Administration’s sudden change in policy, however, is causing some international college applicants to rethink their plans for next year and whether they want to study in the U.S. at all, college experts now say.

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“Overall, this is a very positive development,” according to Robert Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review. It provides needed clarity for international students who have until Thursday, May 1, which is National College Decision Day — the deadline most schools set to choose which institution they will attend in the fall, he said.

For colleges and universities, “international enrollment is an incredible value in the classroom,” Franek said. To that end, college administrators remain highly focused on “having students with different experiences and a number of different voices represented,” he said.

But international student enrollment is also an important source of revenue for U.S. colleges and universities, which is why schools need a contingent of foreign students, who typically pay full tuition, Franek added. This financial reliance makes them a critical component of the higher education system, experts say.

However, because of the U.S. government’s recent changes to the student visa policy, which deactivated and then reactivated the immigration status of thousands of students, “there are a number of international students admitted to great colleges and really skeptical about whether they will come,” Franek said of plans for the fall of 2025.

There are more than 1.1 million international undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S., mostly from India and China, making up slightly less than 6% of the total U.S. higher education population, according to the latest Open Doors data, released by the U.S. Department of State and the Institute of International Education.

In the 2023-24 academic year, the U.S. hosted a record number of students from abroad, marking a 7% increase from the previous year. India surpassed China as the top sending country, with India sending more than 330,000 students. 

Altogether, international student enrollment contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023-24, according to a separate report by NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

“Foreign students present a unique challenge for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy efforts,” said Christopher Rim, president and CEO of college consulting firm Command Education.

“On the one hand, international students account for a large portion of foreign residents in the U.S., and some of the most politically outspoken,” Rims said. “However, they are among the most economically advantageous, as well.”

But according to Rim, who also works with clients all over the world, the U.S. is still the main choice among college-bound students applying to top-ranked institutions, and that is unlikely to change overnight.

“I was in Hong Kong last week speaking to a packed audience of hundreds of students and parents about Ivy League and top-tier U.S. college admissions for expat and international families,” Rim said Monday.

“Despite global shifts, distinct and affluent families remain deeply eager to send their children to the United States for higher education,” he explained. “They continue to recognize the U.S. as home to the world’s leading universities.”

The Trump administration has dismissed the federal government’s lawsuit against National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, abandoning a $2.25 million proposed settlement that could have gone to harmed borrowers.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the Trusts, which it described as a group of 15 “securitization trusts organized under Delaware law that acquire, pool, and securitize student loans, which they then service.”

The CFPB accused the Trusts of bringing improper debt collection lawsuits against private student loan borrowers, suing consumers for debts the Trusts couldn’t prove were owed and attempting to collect on debts after when they were legally allowed to do so.

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The $2.25 million settlement between the government and Trusts was expected to go to impacted borrowers.

But the CFPB under President Donald Trump filed the voluntary dismissal last Friday.

The Trump administration has also moved to gut the CFPB, most recently attempting to terminate as many as 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees. A judge has stopped those cuts.

In February, the CFPB also dismissed its lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. The Bureau sued the student loan servicer in 2024, accusing it of illegally collecting on student debts that borrowers had discharged in bankruptcy and sending false information to credit reporting companies.

The CFPB and White House did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency or counsel for the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts.