In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency whose sole mission is protecting Americans from harmful practices of the financial-services industry. Since then, the CFPB has successfully protected consumers from unfair and predatory practices in the financial-services industry, returning over $21 billion in restitution to consumers.

But the Trump Administration is now attempting to unilaterally eliminate the CFPB by starving it of the funding it needs to operate. To achieve this result, CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought has endorsed a novel reading of Dodd-Frank’s statutory requirement that the Bureau be funded by the “combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System.” Even though the Bureau has long understood “combined earnings” to include all of the Federal Reserve’s total revenue, Vought now adopts the narrower position that the Federal Reserve has “earnings” only when its total revenue exceeds its interest expenses. Based on this new definition, Vought claims that the Federal Reserve currently has no “earnings”—and therefore refuses to requisition any funds to support the Bureau’s important operations.

In December 2025, a lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California that challenges the administration’s new interpretation of “combined earnings.” That month, CAC filed an amici brief on behalf of current and former Members of Congress—including former Senator Chris Dodd and former Representative Barney Frank, the principal sponsors of the Dodd-Frank Act—urging the court to grant summary judgement on behalf of the plaintiffs. The current and former Members of Congress that CAC represents were sponsors of Dodd-Frank, participated in drafting that legislation, or serve on committees with jurisdiction over the federal financial regulatory agencies, and have firsthand familiarity with that statute and the critical work of the CFPB.

Our brief makes two principal points.

First, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress specifically designed the Bureau’s funding structure to ensure stable and continuous support for its operations. It made this decision because Congress engaged in extensive study of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and concluded that an important structural feature that had contributed to the crisis was a lack of consistent funding for federal financial regulators. To prevent that problem in the future, Congress tethered the Bureau’s funding to the Federal Reserve, guaranteeing a continuous and stable source of funds and insulating the Bureau from the unpredictability of the annual appropriations process. Congress ensured that this funding mechanism operated “automatically,” as amicus and former Senator Dodd then explained, providing the Bureau with the steady stream of “resources it needs to perform its functions.”

Second, Acting Director Vought’s novel interpretation of “combined earnings,” which would permit repeated interruptions to Bureau funding, contravenes Congress’s statutory plan for the CFPB. It would cause the Bureau to be defunded intermittently based on the vagaries of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet because the Bureau will lose funding whenever the Federal Reserve faces a budget shortfall. Indeed, it would cause the Bureau’s funding to lapse in times of economic shock or upheaval, precisely when the need for its oversight functions would be especially acute. Vought’s new definition of “combined earnings” would also destroy the Bureau’s independence from the appropriations process by forcing it back to Congress to request funding, a result Congress expressly worked to avoid.