Consumers Brace for Steeper Bills and Lower Credit Scores from Trump’s Financial Deregulation

From medical debt to overdraft fees, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new leaders are targeting recent policies that advocates hoped would be too popular to touch.

Courtesy of J.J. McCorvey, NBC News

Rob Haskell was hoping a new rule would shield his credit report from thousands of dollars in bills for recent heart procedures. Instead, he’s bracing for impact from President Donald Trump’s push to slash financial regulations.

“I’ve always had medical debt hanging over me but, you know, it’s just completely unmanageable,” Haskell said in late May. He was speaking to NBC News from a hospital bed at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Washington, days before an open heart surgery that threatened to yield another steep bill.

“So, to the moon on that one,” he sighed.

The 58-year-old contractor said he has battled a series of heart and kidney issues for most of his life. Despite having health insurance, his medical needs have resulted in thousands of dollars in debt.

Haskell recently paid off a $5,000 bill that knocked his credit score 21 points lower — debt that might have been spared from his report under a rule instituted in the final days of the Biden-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB estimated at the time that the measure would have spared $49 billion in bills from hitting the reports of 15 million people.

But in April, Trump-appointed leadership at the consumer watchdog reversed its position and threw its support behind credit unions and consumer reporting companies seeking to block the rule in a Texas federal court. After twice delaying the policy’s March start date, the judge is expected to rule within days.

Haskell used some retirement savings to pay off his last operation, in 2024. Before his heart surgery last month, he’d hoped the medical debt rule would finally help smooth out his finances, boost his credit score above 700, and improve his chances of buying property to build a home. That now appears unlikely.

“There really was very little information about the whole thing,” Haskell said of the CFPB’s about-face. “I was really surprised.”

The change adds to the financial risks consumers increasingly face from months of cuts and policy rollbacks at the agency, advocates say, contributing to broader economic uncertainty stoked by Trump’s trade war. Since January, CFPB leadership has attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s 1,700 workers, halted standard supervisory and enforcement actions and blocked rules aimed at buttressing consumers’ wallets.

The actions have stunned consumer advocates who just months ago had expected at least some of the Biden-era guidance to remain untouched. Some pointed to the populist economic message that propelled Trump back into the Oval Office, even though the CFPB — itself a byproduct of populist frustrations churned up by the 2008 financial crisis — has drawn GOP ire since its inception.

“These rules generally are very politically popular,” said Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit group that stepped in to defend both the medical debt rule and a separate one capping overdraft fees at large banks at $5. The latter measure was voided in early May when Trump signed House Republicans’ resolution repealing it. When federal agencies’ policies are nullified under the Congressional Review Act, they’re prevented from issuing substantially similar ones in the future.

“They’re actively harming regular, hard-working Americans so that their billionaire buddies can profit,” Wu said of administration officials. “There’s really no other way to look at it.”

Spokespeople for the CFPB and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has cast its changes as efforts to combat government overreach. In remarks to the American Bankers Association in April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was appointed acting director of the CFPB in late January, described Biden-era rules as politically biased and criticized their “compliance costs” that could impede “responsible lending and risk-taking.”

“The associated mission drift can lend itself to political ends,” he said at the time.

The consumer banking industry has applauded efforts to rein in the agency.

“How do we take politics out of regulation, where it never should have been?” Lindsey Johnson, president and CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association, said at a recent industry event. She also thanked Trump in a statement last month cheering the elimination of the overdraft rule “for protecting consumer choice and access to a deeply valued financial tool utilized by millions of Americans in times of need.”

Republican policymakers, both at the CFPB and in Congress, have taken steps to unwind other recent financial regulations.