36 Hours After Russell Vought Took Over Consumer Bureau, He Shut Its Operations

The day before Linda Wetzel closed on her retirement home in Southport, N.C., in 2012 — a cozy place where she could open the windows at night and catch an ocean breeze — the bank making the loan surprised her with a fee she hadn’t expected.Ms.

Wetzel scoured her mortgage paperwork and couldn’t find the charge disclosed anywhere.Ms.Wetzel made the payment and then filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The bank quickly opened an investigation, and a month later, it sent her a $5,600 check.“My first thought was ‘thank you.’ I was in tears,” she recalled.“That money was a year or two of savings on my mortgage.

It was my little nest egg.”Ms.Wetzel’s refund is a tiny piece of the work the bureau has done since it was created in 2011.

It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers.It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.It may no longer be able to carry out that work.President Trump on Friday appointed Russell Vought, who was confirmed a day earlier to lead the Office of Management and Budget, as the agency’s acting director.

Mr.Vought was an author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for upending the federal government that called for significant changes, including abolishing the consumer bureau.In less than 36 hours, Mr.

Vought threw the agency into chaos.On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding.

Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week.Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.The bureau “has been a woke & weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals for a long time,” Mr.

Vought wrote Sunday on X.“This must end.”We are having trouble retrieving the article c...