Press Releases

The United States Senate confirmed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General by a partisan vote of 52-47 this week. On Tuesday evening, Senate Republicans used a procedural maneuver to prevent Senator Elizabeth Warren from reading from the floor of the chamber a 1986 letter from Mrs. Coretta Scott King, who opposed Sessions in his bid for a federal judgeship. Mrs. King...

U.S. Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.) introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would repeal new rules on prepaid cards finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) last October. The rules were designed to protect low-income families, many of whom have no bank account and use prepaid cards to handle their financial transactions. CRA is a legislative tool that...

This afternoon, President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order “directing the Treasury secretary and financial regulators to come up with a plan to revise rules the Dodd-Frank law put in place.” Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) Executive Vice President Debbie Goldstein released the following statement: If this Administration has not learned from the mistakes that caused the...

Today, Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) released statements following the suggestion of the National Economic Council Director that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Director Richard Cordray would be replaced. These developments threaten to leave consumers prone to the types of abusive financial practices that were rampant in the run-up to the Great Recession...

Today, U.S. Senators Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill to severely weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by dismantling the structure of its leadership. The bill, Consumer Financial Protection Board Act, would turn the CFPB’s leadership into a five member commission where it would be vulnerable to partisan gridlock...

National Consumer Advocacy Groups File Motion to Intervene with DC Circuit and Maintain CFPB's Constitutional Authority to Protect Americans from Wall Street Greed Today in a joint effort, advocate groups including Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), Self-Help Credit Union (SHCU), The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG)...

Cost-savings for home buyers purchasing a Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-backed mortgage loan was eliminated by the first executive order of the new Trump Administration. The move rolls back a premium rate cut of .25 percent that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced early last week, which aimed to save borrowers, especially first-time homebuyers, hundreds of dollars a...

Today, the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) released research showing troubling outcomes at Colorado’s four-year for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges leave students with lower graduation rates, higher debt loads, and higher defaults on that debt. These difficulties fall especially heavily on students of color, who are disproportionately enrolled in for-profit colleges in Colorado. CRL analyzed date from the U.S. Department of...

Suit against Navient underscores need to keep the CFPB undisturbed with Richard Cordray as director. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it is suing Navient, formerly part of Sallie Mae and the nation’s largest servicer of both federal and private student loans, over allegations that it routinely cheated borrowers out of their right to lower loan repayments based on...

Innovation Should Not Come at the Expense of Consumer Protection The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the NAACP have sent a letter to Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry urging him not to offer national charters to financial technology firms, which could severely undermine state oversight and state laws that...