The future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) has rarely been more uncertain. Since its creation, the CFPB has been at the center of intense political and policy debate, with its priorities changing dramatically as administrations change. The events of the past year or so under the leadership of Acting Directors chosen by President Trump, however, have taken that policy whiplash to a new level.
In our latest Consumer Finance Monitor podcast released today, Alan Kaplinsky (the founder and former leader for 25 years of the Consumer Financial Services Group at our firm) was joined by two former CFPB officials with decades of experience inside the Bureau: Jason Brown, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former CFPB Assistant Director for Research, and David Silberman, former Acting Deputy Director and longtime Associate Director for Research, Markets and Regulation. We discussed their recent Brookings commentary, “The CFPB: Where to Go From Here,” which proposes a series of structural reforms designed to make the Bureau a more stable and effective financial regulator.
Their recommendations are noteworthy not because they seek to preserve every aspect of the CFPB as it has operated in the past. Rather, they focus on a more fundamental question: How can the CFPB carry out its statutory mission while allowing presidential administrations to pursue different policy agendas without repeatedly dismantling and rebuilding the agency?
The CFPB’s accomplishments are worth preserving
Before discussing reform, Brown and Silberman emphasized that the CFPB has accomplished a great deal since its creation.
Silberman, who was involved with the Bureau from its earliest days, pointed to the extraordinary task of building an entirely new federal agency, including its consumer response function, nonbank supervision program and research infrastructure. He also highlighted the CFPB’s implementation of the Dodd-Frank mortgage provisions in 2013, which he believes provided important clarity to the mortgage market without producing the disruption that otherwise might have occurred.
He also cited the CFPB’s supervision of large consumer reporting agencies and several significant enforcement actions, including cases involving credit-card add-on products and unauthorized account openings of one of the largest banks in the country.
These accomplishments help explain why the question is not simply whether the CFPB should exist. The more important question is what kind of CFPB the country should have going forward.
Policy change is inevitable. Policy whiplash is not.
The current situation, in the view of Brown and Silberman, goes beyond ordinary policy change. They point to the wholesale withdrawal of prior guidance, advisory opinions and enforcement actions as examples of changes that create substantial uncertainty for both consumers and financial institutions.
That uncertainty matters. Financial institutions need to know what the rules are in order to design products, price them appropriately and build effective compliance programs. If the regulatory environment changes dramatically every four years , or even more frequently , institutions may be forced to price regulatory uncertainty into their products and may become less willing to innovate.
Consumers ultimately bear some of those costs.
Five structural reforms
Brown and Silberman’s proposals are aimed at reducing that instability without preventing a future CFPB director from pursuing a different policy agenda.
1. Make Congress more prescriptive
Their first proposal would have Congress provide greater specificity regarding the CFPB’s statutory responsibilities and establish minimum performance expectations.
For example, if Dodd-Frank requires the Bureau to report on particular areas of activity, Congress could make clear that these are affirmative obligations rather than discretionary activities. Congress also could establish minimum expectations concerning examinations and research.
The authors acknowledge that this is not a perfect solution. A director could theoretically satisfy numerical requirements through superficial “check-the-box” exercises. Nevertheless, minimum statutory expectations could establish useful guardrails against a future administration simply deciding not to perform functions Congress assigned to the Bureau.
2. Put key operational positions in career hands
The second proposal would provide greater career continuity for important operational positions, including supervision, enforcement and certain legal functions.
This would not prevent a director from establishing his or her own policy priorities. Rather, it would preserve institutional expertise and continuity in positions that have statutory and operational responsibilities.
Silberman offered an illuminating example from the transition to the Trump administration in 2017. A career general counsel provided advice concerning who could serve as acting director, allowing the Bureau to navigate the transition with institutional continuity.
Importantly, Brown emphasized that the proposal is not a criticism of individuals who have occupied these positions as political appointees. The objective is structural: creating greater stability and consistency within the Bureau.
3. Make rulemaking more attractive than policymaking through enforcement
This may be the most consequential, and most controversial, of the proposals.
The authors argue that the CFPB needs incentives to use formal rulemaking when it seeks to establish generally applicable regulatory requirements, rather than relying on supervision or enforcement as an alternative mechanism for making policy.
One problem is that rulemaking can be time-consuming and expensive, and rules are subject to judicial challenge. The authors suggest that challenges to CFPB rules could begin at the appellate level, as occurs with certain other federal regulatory schemes, potentially making the rulemaking process more efficient and predictable.
At the same time, they propose an independent appeals mechanism for certain supervisory and enforcement decisions, including Matters Requiring Attention and decisions to authorize litigation. Their concept would involve a neutral and expert panel with experience representing both financial-services firms and consumers.
This proposal does not mean that enforcement should occur only when an agency has previously promulgated a regulation specifically prohibiting the challenged conduct. Silberman made clear that some conduct, such as the unauthorized opening of customer accounts by a major bank, can appropriately be addressed through enforcement even without a regulation specifically prohibiting it.
The concern instead is using enforcement to change established understandings of the law without providing the notice and procedural protections associated with rulemaking.
4. Strengthen congressional oversight and independent review
The authors also call for stronger oversight of the Bureau.
They specifically point to the Dodd-Frank requirement that the CFPB director testify before the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee twice each year. Brown noted that the current acting leadership had not appeared for those required hearings despite making significant changes to the Bureau’s staffing, regulatory policies and scope of activity. Since we recorded this podcast, Acting Director Vought did appear at hearings before both Committees.
They also favor a more active CFPB Inspector General and the restoration of independent peer review of important CFPB research.
The latter proposal is particularly interesting. The CFPB’s Academic Research Council provided independent review of significant research used to support policymaking. Brown and Silberman believe that such review can help establish the credibility of the Bureau’s methodology even when the underlying data cannot be publicly disclosed because it is confidential or proprietary.
5. Preserve the CFPB’s existing funding structure
The authors reject another frequently suggested reform: subjecting the CFPB to the annual congressional appropriations process.
Their argument is straightforward. Whatever one’s views about congressional control over agency spending, annual appropriations would not necessarily reduce political volatility. Indeed, it could make the Bureau even more vulnerable to political battles over funding and appropriations riders.
Why not replace the director with a bipartisan commission?
Another frequently proposed reform would replace the CFPB’s single director with a multi-member commission modeled on the Federal Trade Commission.
Brown and Silberman are skeptical.
Their concern is that a five-member commission does not necessarily produce stability. In recent decades, changes in the chair and the political composition of multi-member commissions have themselves produced significant policy shifts. They view the Federal Reserve’s longer terms and larger membership as a materially different model.
Their preferred solution is therefore not necessarily to eliminate the single-director structure, but to put structural guardrails around it.
Some reforms could happen without Congress
One particularly important point from the discussion is that not everything requires legislation.
A future CFPB director could voluntarily place career officials in key operational positions and establish an internal appeals process for supervisory and enforcement decisions. Brown noted that other financial regulators, including the OCC and FDIC, are moving in that direction on their own.
Legislation would make such reforms more durable, but a director committed to institutional stability could begin implementing many of them immediately.
A potential opportunity with new leadership
The discussion also turned to Brian Johnson, who has been nominated to serve as CFPB director.
Both Brown and Silberman spoke favorably about Johnson’s commitment to carrying out the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, even though Silberman emphasized that he and Johnson have very different views on many substantive regulatory issues.
That distinction is important. The goal of structural reform should not be to ensure that every future director adopts the same substantive policies. Presidents are entitled to appoint directors who share their policy objectives.
The goal should be to ensure that those policy differences occur within a stable institutional framework.
The bottom line
The debate over the CFPB too often becomes a debate over whether one supports or opposes the agency. That misses the more important institutional question.
The CFPB has demonstrated that it can play an important role in consumer financial protection. At the same time, the dramatic swings in policy and enforcement priorities over successive administrations have undermined predictability and, in the process, confidence in the Bureau.
Good consumer protection does not have to mean regulatory whiplash.
The reforms proposed by Brown and Silberman would not eliminate political differences over consumer financial policy. Nor should they. Instead, they seek to ensure that those differences are expressed through changes in policy rather than repeated disruption of the institution itself.
That is a goal that ought to have bipartisan appeal.
The CFPB needs reform. But perhaps the most important reform is to make it possible for the Bureau to change direction without repeatedly losing its institutional memory, credibility and ability to perform the job Congress assigned to it.
[Subsequent to the recording of this podcast, two Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee have introduced H.R. 10184, the Consumer Financial Protection Accountability Act and Reform Act of 2026. The legislation addresses a variety of subjects across five titles covering CFPB governance and funding; legal clarity and procedural fairness, including UDAAP; innovation in consumer financial markets; supervision of banks and nonbanks; and regulation by enforcement. Among other provisions, the bill would move the CFPB into the congressional appropriations process, expand rulemaking and retrospective-review requirements, require rulemaking concerning the meaning of “abusive,” revise aspects of bank and nonbank supervision, distinguish nonbinding guidance from enforceable law, and make changes to civil penalties and the Bureau’s complaint framework. It includes only one provision that is part of the 5-point proposal of our guests — namely, increasing oversight of the Bureau by requiring that the CFPB have its own Inspector General rather than having to share with the Federal Reserve Board the same Inspector General.]
