Home → The CFPB pullback
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the federal agency that writes and enforces the rules for payday and high-cost lenders. In 2025 it stopped enforcing its own payday rule, moved to roll it back, and by early 2026 was reported to be running out of money. Here is what actually changed — and, more usefully, what did not.
February 2025
A stop-work order dramatically narrowed the Bureau’s activity. Over the following months most enforcement actions were dropped and regulatory guidance was pulled back — the posture a consumer group later summarised as the agency being “on life support.”[1]
28 March 2025
Two days before its own payday rule’s payment provisions took effect (compliance date 30 March 2025), the CFPB announced it would not prioritize enforcement or supervision of the rule’s payment-withdrawal and disclosure requirements.[2]
Late 2025
A Department of Justice legal opinion concluded the Bureau may have no funds to lawfully draw because the Federal Reserve has reported net losses since 2022 — putting the CFPB on course to exhaust its funding in early 2026.[3]
2026 agenda
The Bureau signalled a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to reconsider the remaining provisions of its 2017 payday rule — the limit on repeated withdrawal attempts after two consecutive failures, and the borrower-notice requirements — as a deregulatory action, anticipated as early as July 2026.[4]
The one federal rule written to stop a lender from draining your bank account is the rule the Bureau chose not to enforce.
That rule matters because of a specific, common harm. When a payday debit bounces, many lenders re-submit it again and again — each failed attempt can trigger a fresh overdraft or non-sufficient-funds fee from your bank. The 2017 rule’s surviving provisions were meant to cap that: no more withdrawal attempts after two consecutive failures without new authorization, plus advance notice.[4] Those are the provisions now unenforced and slated for rollback.
Enforcement of a rule is not the same as your own legal rights. Two protections sit in different law and did not move:
Regulation E lets you revoke a company’s authorization to debit your account and instruct your bank to stop payment — regardless of whether the CFPB is enforcing anything, and regardless of whether you still owe the money. That right is in the regulation, not in the Bureau’s enforcement priorities.[5]
How to stop a lender taking money from your account, provision by provision →
Interest-rate caps, licensing rules and the right to an extended payment plan are set by your state, and they do not depend on the CFPB. As federal oversight recedes, the state page is the one that tells you what still applies where you live.
Check whether your loan is legal in your state → · Rate caps and rules by state →
The regulatory actions we list on lender pages — the CFPB fines against ACE Cash Express, TitleMax, Enova, CashCall and others — remain real and on the record. But they are increasingly historical: with enforcement dropped, new federal actions against these lenders have largely stopped. Read the enforcement record as what regulators found, not as evidence anyone is currently watching.
See the regulatory actions we track →
This site is built on the CFPB’s public complaint database. That database is a federal record, and a funding lapse raises real questions about its upkeep. We are watching it directly, we date every figure we pull, and if the source changes we will say so on this page and on the pages that depend on it.