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The devil is always in the details when it comes to why regulations and government agencies exist, and how the lives of millions can be made more miserable when the regulations are trashed or the agencies crippled.
It's already well-documented that DOGE (Trump's so-called but not-really "Department" of Government Efficiency) has been a monumental failure. Thousands of federal workers have had to be re-hired since Musk and Trump stopped sharing a bed, while chaos and upheaval has resulted in dramatically increased government inefficiency, and the hobbling of the IRS has allowed cheats and frauds to make off with untold hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that the bureau lacks the manpower to ferret out. In fact, by all accounts, DOGE has in the balance caused an increase in federal spending. To get an overview of just how egregious a failure the short-lived DOGE assault on the nation has been, see here:
https://cepr.net/publications/doge-is-dead-the-damage-lives-on/
In the article is this:
Musk and the [Trump] administration sought to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] – which serves to hold major financial actors and corporations accountable – and they have been largely successful in achieving that goal, which will come at the expense of everyday Americans.
The data is now in concerning how the maiming of the CFPB is affecting ordinary US taxpayers. We can start by examining the consumer experience with US credit bureaus. The three major credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—collect financial data to create credit reports that determine your ability to get credit, loans, or housing. If you're the victim of identity theft and fraud, it can impact your credit rating to an extent that impacts your ability to get approval for a loan or mortgage, such that buying a house or car becomes impossible.
There are several things you must do if a scammer gets, say, a credit card or loan in your name. One of those things is to contact the three credit bureaus to set the record straight, which involves "disputing" inaccurate information in your credit file. This requires work on the part of the credit bureaus, who'd rather just rake in money from consumer and corporate subscriptions and do as little as possible in return. In other words they're just like any other late-capitalist enterprise working in the financial sector.
A credit bureau may decline to do the hard work required to resolve a dispute filed by an individual, and simply dismiss it out of hand. When that happens, the individual's only real recourse is to file a complaint with the CFPB, which may investigate the case and pressure the credit bureau to resolve matters to the individual's satisfaction or face hefty fines.
But the CFPB has been crippled by Trump, because apparently giving consumers any kind of protections against fraud is not "making America great again." (Always ask: "great" for whom?) The CFPB, being short on manpower, no longer does much anymore to keep the credit bureaus honest. The result? You can see here:
https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cfpb-experian-transunion
TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB.
Rebecca Sheppard specializes in untangling other people’s financial messes. But for nearly a year, the Colorado accountant has been unable to fix a glaring error on her own credit report.
Her credit score plunged roughly 85 points because of a $240,000 student loan debt she does not owe. She repeatedly asked the nation’s big three credit reporting companies to correct the mistake, submitting documentation showing the debt belonged to her ex-husband. Even the loan’s account manager confirmed she wasn’t responsible.
Still, the credit bureaus refused to remove it, jeopardizing her plans to move with her disabled father into a more accessible home. “There’s no way in the world I could qualify for the purchase,” she said.
Sheppard should have been able to count on the federal government to pressure the credit bureaus to take her dispute seriously. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wielded the threat of fines and lawsuits to make companies fix errors and engage with consumers. Under the Biden administration, a rigorous supporter of the agency, consumers’ rates of relief for such complaints rose to about 10 times as high as in 2020.
But Sheppard needed help under the Trump administration, which has drastically curtailed the CFPB’s mission, including its policing of credit bureaus. With the agency weakened, two of the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion and Experian, have sharply reduced the share of consumer complaints they resolved in customers’ favor, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal complaint data.
The charts in the article show a veritable explosion in the number of consumer complaints directed at two of the three credit bureaus which were not resolved satisfactorily. It's shameful, and reflects a true decrease in the quality of life for ordinary people.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because the CFBP did so much more than police the credit bureaus, and there are so many other federal agencies that likewise safeguarded the interests of ordinary folks but now lie in shambles.
The news today is always about the long lines at airports, but mountains of other things are going on that are adversely affecting people thanks to a vicious, corrupt, and utterly incompetent administration in the White House. This may be the first in a series of threads I'll make that examines the lesser-known things going very seriously wrong in the US that the mainstream media largely ignores as it continues to "sanewash" a sick and demented "president."