Greene County Democrat

Tag: Russell Vought

  • Newswire : Court ruling forces Trump Administration to restore CFPB funding – consumers lost more than $15 billion because of weakened oversight

    A woman in a blue jacket passionately speaks into a microphone at a rally, surrounded by a diverse group of supporters holding signs. Behind her are several signs advocating for consumer protection rights.

    California Congresswoman Maxine Waters speaks at a CFPB rally. Also attending are Representatives Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio). At Center for Responsible Lending
      
    (TriceEdneyWire.com) – Over the past year, the Trump administration took a series of steps to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Despite broad and bipartisan legislative and consumer support for the agency’s efforts that delivered transparency in financial transactions for consumers, these reversals also ended the kind of data collection, research, and investigations of consumer complaints that together held violators accountable, while making defrauded consumers financially whole.  
     
    Russell Vought, appointed to serve as both Secretary of the Office of Management and Budget and CFPB’s Acting Director, ordered the agency to close its offices early last year and then months later, chose not to request any funding from the Federal Reserve. Unlike many federal agencies subject to annual congressional appropriation, the CFPB receives its funding directly from the Federal Reserve. Caught up in this agency role reversal were an estimated 1,400 employees left uncertain whether their jobs could be retained or their collective mission continued. 
     
    But on December 30, a federal district judge issued a series of rulings that made clear that no administration could ignore or eliminate what Congress previously enacted into law, clearing the way for the Bureau to continue its important work.
     
    In just two consumer categories – fees for late credit card payments and overdraft – an estimated $15 billion were taken from the pockets of consumers. Overdraft regulation that was set to take effect last year was scuttled at a cumulative consumer cost of $5 billion, while $32 monthly credit card late fees took another $10 billion from the pockets of everyday working people. 
     
    “By stopping virtually all work at the Consumer Bureau, President Trump is giving financial companies a green light to cheat working Americans out of their hard-earned money,” said Mike Calhoun, President of the Center for Responsible Lending.
     
    Speaking directly to the administration’s refusal to request agency funding, s 32-page ruling wrote in part:
     
    “The defendants’ interpretation of the Dodd-Frank Act is contrary to the text and intent of the statute and the way it has been consistently interpreted by both the Federal Reserve and the CFPB… [N]ot one penny of the funding needed to run the agency that has returned over $21 billion to American consumers comes from taxpayer dollars. The only new circumstance is the administration’s determination to eliminate an agency created by Congress with the stroke of pen, even while the matter is before the Court of Appeals.”  
     
    The ruling also itemized the duties CFPB “shall” perform:
     
    • Reinstate all probationary and term employees terminated between February 10, 2025 and December 30, the date of this order, including but not limited to the Private Student Loan Ombudsman.
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    • No termination of any CFPB employee, except for cause related to the individual employee’s performance or conduct; nor issue any notice of reduction-in-force to any CFPB employee.
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    • Ensure that employees can perform their statutorily mandated functions, the defendants must provide them with either fully equipped office space, or permission to work remotely and laptop computers that are enabled to connect securely to the agency server.
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    • Ensure that the CFPB Office of Consumer Response continues to maintain a single, toll-free telephone number, a website, and a database for the centralized collection of consumer complaints regarding consumer financial products and services, and that it continues to monitor and respond to those complaints.
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    • Rescind all notices of contract termination issued on or after February 11, 2025, and they may not reinitiate the wholesale cancellation of contracts.
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    For Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee and a long-time CFPB champion, reacted to the court ruling saying,  “Let’s be clear, the Trump Administration’s efforts to defund or dismantle this agency are not about fiscal responsibility, they are about shielding their allies on Wall Street and other powerful corporate interests from oversight while working families are left to fend for themselves.”

    “At a time when families are already being squeezed by the Trump Administration’s reckless economic agenda, weakening the CFPB only makes it harder for people to keep up with rising costs, avoid financial abuse, and stay afloat”, Waters concluded. 
     
    Charlene Crowell is a senior fellow with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at Charlene.crowell@responsiblelending.org” 

     

  • Newswire : The exit signs are flashing at the place that wrote the authoritarian playbook

    By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    The Heritage Foundation is beginning to come apart in public, and what is unraveling is not simply a think tank but a long-maintained illusion. More than 60 senior staff members, fellows, and trustees have now resigned from the institution that spent decades presenting itself as the sober custodian of conservative thought.
    Board members tied to major donors have stepped down. Veteran policy writers have walked away. What remains is an organization forced, perhaps for the first time, to reckon with the distance between how it spoke about America and what it planned to do to it.
    Philosophers have long maintained that power, when it believes itself righteous, often mistakes silence for consent. The Heritage Foundation thrived on that mistake. For years it wrote in careful abstractions, never naming the people its policies would dispossess, never acknowledging the communities that would be bruised by its ideas.
    Project 2025 changed that. Nearly 900 pages long, the document spoke plainly. It described how to bend the federal government toward a single will. It explained how to weaken civil rights enforcement, how to hollow out agencies, how to turn immigration into mass detention, and how to place ideology above law. It did not whisper. It declared.
    Donald Trump told the country he had nothing to do with it. He said he did not know the authors. He dismissed the warnings as political theater. Those words collapsed the moment he returned to the White House and appointed Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s principal architects, to run the Office of Management and Budget. The blueprint Trump denied became the machinery through which his presidency now moves.
    “A lot of the policies from Day 1 to the last day and in between that the administration has adopted are right out of Project 2025,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, as his office and others prepared lawsuits not in reaction, but in expectation.
    What followed has been neither theoretical nor restrained. In Minneapolis, a federal agent shot and killed a man during an operation, igniting protests in a city that already carries the memory of unchecked force. Immigration hardened into something colder still when the administration suspended visa processing for applicants from 75 countries, closing pathways without warning and without apology. Across the nation, demonstrations rose as Americans confronted a government that now acts as though consent is an obstacle rather than a foundation.
    Project 2025 anticipated this atmosphere. Its immigration chapter calls for ending asylum at the border, canceling legal status for millions, compelling local police to serve federal deportation goals, and expanding detention camps through executive authority alone. It treats people as numbers to be managed and rights as technicalities to be brushed aside.
    For Black America, this moment is not unfamiliar. Civil rights organizations have warned that Project 2025 threatens voting access, education protections, housing enforcement, and reproductive autonomy. The document rarely names Black communities directly, yet it targets the very systems that protect Black citizenship and political power. The danger lies not in what it says aloud, but in what it dismantles quietly.
    Abroad, the same logic has spilled beyond U.S. borders. On January 3, American forces struck Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York to face federal charges. Governments across Europe and Latin America condemned the action as a breach of international law. The United States escalated further by seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, tightening control over the country’s resources and deepening regional instability.
    In the Arctic, Trump renewed his demand for U.S. control of Greenland, declaring anything less unacceptable. Denmark deployed troops. Protests filled streets in Greenland and Copenhagen. A Greenlandic official broke down on live television after a White House meeting failed to soften Washington’s posture. At Davos, Trump’s confrontations with European leaders turned diplomacy into spectacle and strained alliances that had taken generations to build.
    This is not chaos without authorship. Analysts tracking implementation estimate that roughly half of Project 2025 has already been executed through executive orders, agency restructuring, and enforcement changes. This was not improvisation. It was preparation made visible.
    Now the institution that helped write the script is fracturing. Donors have pulled back. Trustees have resigned. Senior figures have said privately that Heritage no longer distinguishes between conservative governance and extremism. The organization insists the departures are part of a realignment, yet those who left describe something else entirely. They describe an unwillingness to confront hatred. They describe a tolerance for rhetoric that stains everything it touches. They describe an institution that chose influence over responsibility.
    “When an institution hesitates to confront harmful ideas and allows lapses in judgment to stand, it forfeits the moral authority on which its influence depends,” former trustee Abby Spencer Moffat said.

  • Newswire : Millions suffer as Trump’s economy crumbles

    By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

    America’s economy is not collapsing by accident. Under President Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller, a deliberate plan has taken hold, a plan that weakens the labor market, starves families of food and health care, and rewards the wealthy with power and profit. What was once called “economic populism” has become an organized campaign of cruelty that has left the country broken and millions of Americans in despair.
    The labor market is in free fall. UPS cut 48,000 workers, the largest reduction in its 117-year history. Amazon is firing up to 30,000 corporate employees. Intel eliminated 24,000 positions. Nestlé slashed 16,000 jobs. Ford and Accenture each let go of 11,000 workers. Novo Nordisk terminated 9,000 employees. Microsoft cut 7,000. PwC laid off 5,600. Salesforce dismissed 4,000. Paramount reduced 2,000. Target eliminated 1,800. Kroger cut 1,000. Applied Materials reduced 1,444, and Meta let go of 600.
    The layoffs have rippled across every major industry, devastating workers, families, and communities nationwide. According to Intellizence data, more than 4,200 companies have announced mass layoffs since January. The Associated Press reported that executives cite Trump’s tariffs, erratic trade actions, and federal instability as the leading causes of widespread job losses and frozen hiring.
    While the job market collapses, Trump’s government shutdown has unleashed a humanitarian crisis. More than 42 million Americans, many of whom supported Trump, will lose access to food assistance through SNAP and WIC. Another 25 million people will lose their health care.
    Trump also canceled nearly 94 million pounds of food aid, including meat, eggs, and dairy, that were supposed to reach food banks across the country. For those working on the front lines of hunger relief, it was an invisible theft—food promised but never delivered.
    The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed it will not release $6 billion in contingency funds, claiming the money can only be used for “unforeseen events” such as natural disasters. Yet Trump approved $40 billion for Argentina, spent $1 billion for a private jet stationed in Qatar, and at least $300 million to destroy historic White House property and construct a new ballroom for himself.
    Taxpayers have been forced to pay an estimated $30 million for his golf trips, $520 million for unnecessary National Guard deployments, and $172 million for jets requested by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. None of those expenditures has lowered health care costs or provided relief to struggling families.
    While ordinary Americans lose jobs, food, and medical care, Trump’s personal income has skyrocketed. The Trump Organization reported $864 million in revenue in the first half of 2025, a 17-fold increase from the previous year. Most of that money came from cryptocurrency ventures. Financial filings show $463 million from sales of World Liberty Financial tokens and another $336 million from TRUMP meme coins.
    The investigation revealed that foreign investors were heavily involved. Hong Kong-based billionaire Justin Sun, who reportedly was charged with fraud by the SEC in 2023, bought $75 million worth of Trump tokens. Abu Dhabi’s state-controlled MGX used Trump’s stablecoin to fund a $2 billion investment in Binance. Chinese businessman Guren “Bobby” Zhou, reportedly under investigation for money laundering in Britain, purchased $100 million in tokens. Trump, meanwhile, eliminated federal crypto enforcement teams, withdrew regulatory warnings, and pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao after his conviction for anti-money-laundering failures. Ethics experts have called it the most blatant conflict of interest in U.S. history.
    Vought, Trump’s former budget director and the author of Project 2025, created the framework for this collapse. His plan dismantles federal oversight, guts safety nets, and funnels public funds into private and partisan interests. Miller, Trump’s longtime political enforcer, has turned those ideas into action by starving agencies, blocking aid, and tightening control of the economy under the White House.
    Wall Street, meanwhile, is celebrating the pain. UPS shares surged nine percent after its mass firings, and Amazon’s stock climbed on news of more job cuts. Economists say this “profit from pain” economy has become Trump’s defining legacy, an America where corporate success depends on working-class suffering. The fallout is everywhere. Food banks are running out of supplies. Hospitals are closing departments. Families are skipping rent to pay for prescriptions. Millions who once believed Trump would protect them are now struggling to survive policies that favor billionaires, foreign investors, and the politically connected.
    Georgetown University business professor Jason Schloetzer told the Associated Press that uncertainty has replaced confidence in every corner of the job market. “A lot of people are looking around, scanning the job environment, scanning the opportunities that are available to them, whether it’s in the public or private sector,” he said. “And I think there’s a question mark around the long-term stability everywhere.”