In ongoing records purge, CFPB deletes supervisory reports

Processing Content

• 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.
• 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. 
• 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.  

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.  

The scale of the deletion of files is staggering.

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. 

“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.”

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. 

Also gone are hundreds of consumer education guides that contain tips designed to help everyday Americans navigate complex financial markets. 

“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.”

Current CFPB employees said they are unable to access prior work content, even internally. 

“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.

A former bureau official called the scrubbing of content a counterproductive political stunt. 

“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.”

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.

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 retention requirements have largely survived subsequent legal challenges in the appellate courts.

Though the official CFPB’s website has been hollowed out, the internet never truly forgets.

The information that has been deleted by the CFPB, and taken out of the public domain, is periodically sent to the National Archives, experts said. In addition, the National Treasury Employees Union, Local 335, has maintained a cloned website that is an archive of the official CFPB site as it appeared on March 5, 2025, with the exception of the homepage. 

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, deleted the CFPB’s homepage content in mid-February 2025, resulting in a much-publicized 404 message displayed to visitors. The homepage on the cloned site, which includes a warning header, was restored from a Feb. 3, 2025, internet archive snapshot of the official site. In addition, former employees have kept copies of the missing Supervisory Highlights on private domains, and have taken screenshots of former webpages.

However, a Google search for “supervisory highlights,” or past blog posts, will direct visitors to the bureau’s old website, with the content missing or no results shown. 

The sudden disappearance of so much information has sent consumer advocates scrambling to retrieve or make copies of past documents. Consumer policy experts warn that deleting the content creates barriers for finding crucial information about consumer protections. 

McArdle said the scrubbed data isn’t just for consumers — private financial institutions heavily relied on those historical reports to prove to state regulators why they took certain compliance actions over the years. There also are consumer education articles that other sites have linked to over the years.

Feltner said the CFPB is hiding from the financial industry market-moving research and compliance information, and that the removal “makes it harder for Congress to conduct oversight.” 

Overall, AFR found that the CFPB has deleted 81 articles that included congressional testimony from all prior administrations, including the first Trump administration. In addition, 13 regulatory comment submissions to other federal agencies, state legislatures and state regulators were deleted, AFR said. Testimony provided as part of the CFPB’s legally required semiannual reports to Congress also have been purged.

In March, Vought wrote in the semiannual report that he has been working “to reverse the prior leadership’s abuses and overreach of its statutory mandates.” To be clear, the most significant deletion of information occurred last May with the formal withdrawal of agency guidance and proposed rules. Vought has withdrawn over a dozen final and proposed rules and nearly 70 guidance documents, many from the Chopra era.

Though Vought is required by law to testify twice a year before Congress, he has not done so, despite multiple demands from lawmakers and statutory requirements. While he has appeared on Capitol Hill several times in 2025 and 2026, those appearances were in his role as director of the Office of Management and Budget to discuss budget requests and spending cuts. 

The National Treasury Employees Union sued Vought and the CFPB last February to stop what the NTEU claimed was a purge of union employees. That litigation is ongoing. Last month, the CFPB told employees it was ending telework, and ordered all staff back to a new headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Rachel Cauley, a CFPB spokeswoman who is the communications director at the Office of Management and Budget, did not respond to a request for comment.