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• Require the SEC and the CFTC to publish a detailed annual report on SRO supervision.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The preparation of this chapter was a collective enterprise of individuals involved in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Paul Atkins, C. Wallace DeWitt, Christopher lacovella, Brian Knight, Chelsea Pizzola, and Andrew Vollmer deserve special mention. The author alone assumes responsibility for the content of this chapter, and no views expressed herein should be attributed to any other individual.

CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU Robert Bowes he Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was authorized in 2010 by the Dodd-Frank Act.” Since the Bureau’s inception, its status as an “independent” agency with no congressional oversight has been questioned in multiple court cases, and the agency has been assailed by critics*? as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.

In 2015, for example, Investor’s Business Daily accused the CF PB of “diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party” and planning “to create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund from its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions” that would use “ramped-up (and trumped-up) anti-discrimination lawsuits and investigations” to “bankroll some 60 liberal nonprofits, many of whom are radical Acorn-style pressure groups.”**

The CFPB has a fiscal year (FY) 2023 budget of $653.2 million® and 1,635 fulltime equivalent (FTE) employees.*° From FY 2012 through FY 2020, it imposed approximately $1.25 billion in civil money penalties;*’ in FY 2022, it imposed approximately $172.5 million in civil money penalties.** These penalties are imposed by the CFPB Civil Penalty Fund, described as “a victims relief fund, into which the CFPB deposits civil penalties it collects in judicial and administrative actions under Federal consumer financial laws.”*?

The CF PB is headed by a single Director who is appointed by the President to a five-year term.*° Its organizational structure includes five divisions: Operations; Consumer Education and External Affairs; Legal; Supervision, Enforcement and Fair Lending; and Research, Monitoring and Regulations." Each of these divisions reports to the Office of the Director, except for the Operations Division, which reports to the Deputy Director.

Passage of Title X of Dodd-Frank was a bid to placate concern over a series of regulatory failures identified in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The law imported a new superstructure of federal regulation over consumer finance and