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- Key insight: The Federal Trade Commission has positioned itself as the main watchdog of nonbanks, stepping up oversight and enforcement amid a retreat by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- What’s at stake: The FTC is pursuing an anti-fraud mandate reining in scams, fraud and market distortions.
Though consumer protection at the federal level has ground to a halt under the second Trump administration, one agency is a notable exception: the Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC has maintained an active docket with aggressive oversight of major technology platforms and digital payment processors engaged in facilitating fraud and deceptive practices, including surveillance pricing and undisclosed fees. In light of that record, financial services companies shouldn’t assume that consumer-protection enforcement in Washington will be nonexistent for the next two years.
In the past six weeks alone, the FTC has filed 10 significant enforcement actions, including a $225 million settlement with the multilevel marketer Amway and a $100 million settlement with Corplay, for charging unauthorized, hidden fees to fuel-card customers. In just two years, the FTC has brought in nearly $3 billion in restitution to consumers.
The shift has less to do with any specific policy goals of the Trump administration and more to do with the agency’s personnel. FTC Director Andrew Ferguson and Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, have worked to bring more enforcement actions over the past two years.
“If you were to talk to Director Mufarrige, he would say the FTC is a law-enforcement agency focused on identifying fraud and the traditional unfair and deceptive practices that disrupt the competitive process,” said Bradford Hardin, a partner at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine.
On Monday, the White House nominated Mufarrige to be the third Republican commissioner on the FTC’s five-member board, which requires Senate approval.
Mufarrige and his No. 2 Levi Swank, the deputy director of litigation at the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, have an anti-fraud enforcement agenda. In addition to deceptive billing practices, the FTC is focused on threats from AI-accelerated cyber fraud and financial losses from customer cyber scams. In the past two years, the FTC has brought in nearly $3 billion, outpacing the Biden administration’s more than $2 billion of redress over four years.
The FTC’s authority is generally limited to nonbanks, including payment processors and auto dealers, but it also shares certain powers with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
For example, the FTC regulates the privacy and security of consumer information, the collection and use of consumer credit information, and also enforces against nonbanks the Truth in Lending Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. It can also enforce the federal prohibition on unfair and deceptive practices against nonbanks.
Apart from the FTC, enforcement of consumer-protection laws has collapsed to near-zero at the federal level. Federal enforcement declined throughout 2025, in line with the Trump administration’s policy goals to reduce the footprint of the CFPB and prudential regulators, resulting in “minimal actions and penalties compared to prior years,” according to
The sharp decline of federal enforcement actions by the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, along with the CFPB, stands in contrast to a pattern of steady enforcement by state attorneys general.
“Enforcement is simply not a priority for this administration,” said Hardin.
With the CFPB on ice, the FTC has emerged as the Trump administration’s primary watchdog, albeit focused on an aggressive anti-fraud mandate and a belief in free-market competition.
The FTC recently expanded a landmark $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over deceptive sign-ups and hidden cancellation hurdles of Amazon Prime. It also has slapped industry giants, including Walmart, Uber, DoorDash and Target, with inquiries on how consumer data and AI algorithms dictate dynamic pricing and worker pay.
The FTC currently has just two commissioners after President Trump fired two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, in March 2025. Trump claimed the president can fire members of independent commissions — at any time and without cause — and the Supreme Court
Joe Simonson, a White House senior policy advisor who serves as an FTC spokesman, said there is no statutory language dictating when FTC members should be nominated and confirmed.
“The president, the White House, has not nominated Democratic commissioners, and that’s his prerogative, and the Supreme Court has upheld that prerogative,” Simonson told American Banker.
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While the CFPB has not completely vanished — the agency is quietly conducting bank examinations, rolling back policies implemented during Democratic administrations and keeping a handful of enforcement investigations alive — its posture is a shadow of its former self.
Staff morale at the CFPB has hit rock-bottom, and public enforcement actions have plummeted. Some enforcement attorneys are being moved into regulations and rule-writing roles as the bureau waits for Brian Johnson, the former No. 2 at the agency in the first Trump administration, to be confirmed by the Senate during the lame-duck session.
“The problem with the approach they’ve taken so far is they’ve just been cutting staff,” said Konrad Alt, a co-founder and managing partner at Klaros Group, an advisory and investment firm. “If there’s another crisis, which there will be, they’ve got no old approach, and they’ve got no new approach, either.”
