Trump Administration Fires Consumer Bureau Chief Rohit Chopra

• Feb. 1, 2025Updated 10:20 a.m. ET

The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, was fired on Saturday, prematurely ending a five-year term that was scheduled to run through late 2026.

“With so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, agencies like the C.F.P.B. have never been more critical,” Mr. Chopra wrote in a letter he posted on social media announcing his departure.

Mr. Chopra expected to be fired immediately after President Trump took office, but he improbably hung on for nearly two weeks, even as the president ousted scores of other agency leaders. He used that time to impose a $2 million fine on a money transmitter and release reports on auto lending costs, specialty credit reporting companies and rent payment data.

When Congress created the consumer bureau in 2011 — to increase oversight of mortgage loans and other financial products in the aftermath of the Great Recession — it included guardrails to protect the agency’s independence and shield it from shifting political tides. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the president was free to fire the agency’s director without cause, which cleared the way for the bureau’s leadership to change with each presidential administration.

Mr. Chopra was a scourge of Wall Street, known for his aggressive approach to enforcing consumer protection laws and expanding their boundaries by issuing new rules. He led a crackdown that prompted most large banks to abandon or significantly reduce overdraft fees, and he ordered Wells Fargo to pay $2 billion in 2022 to customers harmed by its misdeeds, which included improperly seizing some borrowers’ cars and homes.

Mr. Chopra was especially focused on tightening the rules governing large technology companies’ consumer payment services and use of customer data, an effort that drew praise from banking trade groups. But those groups fiercely opposed many of his other actions, often tying them up in years of litigation.