Dozens of protesters lined the sidewalk in front of Bank of America at the corner of Gregson Street and Club Boulevard in Durham Monday evening, waving signs to defend the agency responsible for regulating the institution looming behind them.
The demonstration comes amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crusade to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which employs a number of Durham residents, including four federally appointed financial regulators.
The CFPB was established in 2011 as a watchdog to curb predatory financial practices exposed during the 2008 economic crisis. The agency is funded through the Federal Reserve System, not tax dollars, and has returned $21 billion to Americans harmed by financial institutions since its founding—far more than the cost to run the agency in that same time period.
“It’s under attack because it’s been so successful,” says Adam Rust, a protester holding a hot pink sign. Rust is not a CFPB employee but works in consumer advocacy as the director of financial services for the Consumer Federation. “The big banks don’t like it, the payday lenders don’t like it, payment app companies don’t like it.”
In February, the Trump administration, by way of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), initiated plans to drastically reduce the CFPB workforce, aiming to reduce the agency from 1,700 employees to just five.
“That’s not a tightening of belts,” Rust says. “That’s an evisceration.”
Following a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTU), which represents CFPB employees, U.S. district judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a preliminary injunction on March 28, halting the layoffs and ordering the reinstatement of all terminated employees. While the injunction prevented the complete dismantling of the agency, it remains in limbo as the administration has already appealed parts of the ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Alexis Goldstein, a member of NTU 335 who works in the CFPB’s Office of Chief Technologist, was among those laid off in the second wave of terminations on February 13. She and her colleagues returned to work on March 29.
“It feels like our reinstatement is a bit of a charade to keep the government out of trouble in the courts,” Goldstein says. Because Congress established the CFPB through legislation, Goldstein notes the executive branch lacks the authority to dismantle it.
Goldstein says consumers rely on the CFPB’s oversight for protections many take for granted when dealing with financial institutions.
“I think a lot of things that banks do for their customers, people assume that it’s because the banks are just really nice, but it’s actually because the CFPB requires that they follow the law,” she says. “If somebody erroneously repossesses your car and you don’t even have a car loan, we would be who you would call. If somebody illegally foreclosed on you and was stealing your home wrongfully, we have a special unit dedicated to people who are facing imminent exposure. If you forget your ATM card in an ATM and someone takes your ATM card and buys $100 of stuff at Target, we oversee the law that says, as long as you call your bank, the bank has to put the money back in your account while they investigate what happened.”
Goldstein likens the effort to gut the agency to “shooting the guard dog before you rob the house,” pointing specifically to Musk’s announced plans to enter the payments industry.
The rally attracted particular interest in Durham, which is home to the national nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending and what Rust calls “a huge concentration of people who work in consumer protection.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already begun reversing previous CFPB enforcement actions. Rust and Goldstein point to the case of Townstone Financial, which was fined $105,000 during Trump’s first term for alleged discriminatory practices.
“Trump 2.0 not only took that back, they basically wrote this whole blog post apologizing, and they gave money back to Townstone,” Goldstein says. “So Trump 2.0 apologized for enforcement action taken by Trump 1.0.”
Rust says that while the CFPB might not be a household name, its purpose resonates with everyone who has ever dealt with a financial institution.
“Everyone’s had a problem with their bank,” Rust says. “Everyone’s had a problem where they couldn’t get something resolved, and no matter how many times you called, the bank wouldn’t fix it. It might’ve been months that you’ve been complaining. Then you go to the bureau, and in my experience, you get an answer from the CFPB the next day. If you lose that, it resets the playing field between banks and people.”
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