In ongoing records purge, CFPB deletes supervisory reports | American Banker

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In ongoing records purge, CFPB deletes supervisory reports<br>By Kate Berry CloseText

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Published June 08, 2026, 4:33 p.m. EDT<br>Updated June 08, 2026, 5:24 p.m. EDT

6 Min Read

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Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Bloomberg News

Processing Content<br>Key insight: The CFPB has deleted roughly 3,800 articles, consumer advisories, letters to state regulators, blog posts, speeches and press releases since mid-May.<br>Forward look: All deleted content removed from the CFPB's website has been maintained by the CFPB's union through an off-site, third-party archive that comes with a warning header.<br>Expert quote: "Deleting this information wholesale is a step in the wrong direction." — Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at Americans for Financial Reform

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is pulling the plug on its own history.<br>In a sweeping digital purge, the Trump administration's CFPB has quietly scrubbed over a decade of consumer guidance, blog posts and public records from its website. Critics call it a deliberate attempt to rewrite the agency's past — and a devastating blow to financial transparency.<br>The scale of the deletion of files is staggering.<br>In all, the CFPB has deleted roughly 3,800 consumer advisories, pieces of congressional testimony, letters to state regulators, blog posts, speeches and press releases, according to Americans for Financial Reform, a consumer advocacy group that has been tracking information on the CFPB's website.

Tom Feltner, associate director of consumer policy at AFR, said much of the content is no longer available or is inaccessible to the public, as well as to federal and state regulators.<br>"Deleting this information wholesale is a step in the wrong direction," said Feltner, who was a policy fellow and advisor at the CFPB under former Democratic CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. "This is an example of the continued removal of consumer information and another attempt to rewrite the CFPB's history."<br>On Tuesday, the bureau removed 35 Supervisory Highlights reports from its website, Feltner said. But the overall purge of content began last month. On May 14, the bureau deleted more than 1,600 blog posts that included statements from past directors as well as articles detailing regulatory updates. On May 19, the CFPB deleted its entire pre-2025 newsroom content, including every press release and official statement published before February 2025, when acting CFPB Director Russell Vought took over the agency. The CFPB deleted 1,427 press releases spanning all prior administrations, which include plain-language summaries of major regulations, enforcement actions and other updates, according to AFR.<br>Also gone are hundreds of consumer education guides that contain tips designed to help everyday Americans navigate complex financial markets.<br>"Removing this information hides key agency actions and the views of prior leadership from the public and the media," Feltner said. "It makes it harder for people to find objective information about the risks of certain financial products and what protections are available."<br>Current CFPB employees said they are unable to access prior work content, even internally.<br>"They seem to have destroyed, or at least hid, the historic intranet information," said a CFPB employee, who asked for anonymity due to fear of retaliation.<br>A former bureau official called the scrubbing of content a counterproductive political stunt.<br>"This whole exercise is futile and counterproductive; it serves no one to erase the past," says Mark McArdle, senior vice president of regulatory affairs and public policy at Newrez, and a former CFPB assistant director of mortgage markets. "If you want to go in another direction, do so, but many of the resources published over the years are useful to both consumers and industry — if for no other reason than as a record of what the bureau did."<br>The Federal Records Act legally bars the CFPB from destroying internal databases. In addition, a federal district court explicitly prohibited the CFPB in early 2025 from destroying records and deleting data. The order was part of a broader legal effort to prevent the dismantling of the agency following the Trump administration's attempt to fire roughly 1,400 employees.<br>The record-retention requirements issued in March by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson specifically addressed the preservation of the CFPB's "institutional memory" and operational data. Moreover, those...