The Trump administration is rapidly delivering wins to American companies by rolling back regulations, pausing investigations and retreating from lawsuits accusing employers of discrimination.
A combination of firings, stop-work orders and litigation pauses has hobbled regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The moves have led the S.E.C. to pull back on its attempt to police the cryptocurrency boom and upended efforts at other agencies to protect worker rights.
The speed and scale of the deregulatory moves by President Trump reflect his ambitious agenda to downsize government.
But the upshot of all this upheaval is simple: Regulatory agencies that are intended to protect ordinary Americans, workers and homeowners are being gutted, consumer advocates say.
“Under the Trump administration, federal consumer protections are being rapidly stripped away in a lawless process,” said Adam Levitin, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in financial regulation. “This is deregulation by firings.”
It’s not uncommon for a new administration to pause some rules and regulations enacted under an earlier administration to ensure they reflect a new president’s priorities.
But Mr. Trump’s plan to shrink the federal work force through buyouts and mass firings could complicate the ability of regulators to do their jobs and is neutering those agencies. On Tuesday evening dozens of employees at the consumer bureau and the Small Business Administration were fired.
Some of the Trump administration’s policy changes are in keeping with a series of sweeping executive orders the president signed to stamp out programs protecting the rights of transgender people or climate change initiatives.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency both moved quickly to withdraw from an international climate change organization made up of bank supervisors.
One change to a federal housing program that was meant to protect against gender discrimination has overtly religious underpinnings.
Scott Turner, the new secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced Friday that HUD’s staff was halting enforcement actions that further a “far-left gender ideology” when it comes to housing programs. He said the 2016 rule was inconsistent with “what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in His own image.”
The overhaul of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau amounts, in effect, to the closure of the roughly 1,700-employee agency, which regulates financial services companies. All work at the bureau has been halted this week.
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have long favored regulatory relief and in a report in January listed it as one of its top priorities for the year. In particular, the chamber said the consumer bureau had engaged in “egregious” overreach.
Kristin E. Hickman, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in administrative law, said no matter the threats, only Congress could do away with a congressionally created agency like the consumer bureau. But she also noted that presidents had latitude in how much authority they could give to an agency.
She said there was “a lot of wiggle room” when it came to the ability to “expand or shrink what an agency is doing.”
Here’s a closer look at some of the more significant changes going on at regulatory agencies under the Trump administration:
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Russell Vought, whom Mr. Trump tapped to lead the Office of Management and Budget, wasted no time during his first few days as acting director of the consumer bureau, the federal watchdog created in the wake of the financial crisis.
He quickly ordered employees at the agency to shut down all “supervision and examination activity.” He directed the bureau’s lawyers to ask a judge to delay a rule that would require credit-reporting companies to keep medical debt off consumers’ credit scores. He shut the agency’s offices for a week.
And on Tuesday night, more than 70 employees, including enforcement lawyers, were laid off. The firings occurred just hours before Mr. Trump named Jonathan McKernan, a former F.D.I.C. official, as the consumer bureau’s director.
Further signaling a retreat from enforcement actions, the bureau also ended its contracts with a number of expert witnesses, who evaluate the evidence and testify in cases against companies, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Mr. Vought has long favored abolishing the consumer bureau, which focuses on preventing banks and other financial services firms from taking advantage of customers. One of the last acts the consumer bureau took during the Biden administration was to sue Capital One, accusing the bank of misleading consumers with promises of a high-yielding savings account.
The bureau is also a particular target of Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, and his team of young cost cutters. Just last week, in a post on his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk all but called for the bureau’s demise. He has been creating a payment platform on X that would be regulated by the bureau.
Securities and Exchange Commission
At the S.E.C., the acting chair, Mark Uyeda, has been taking aim at crypto regulation.
His first move was to create a crypto task force that will devise a framework for regulating the unruly industry without relying mainly on enforcement cases.
The task force is a rebuff to what the crypto industry saw as the heavy-handed approach taken by Gary Gensler, the previous S.E.C. chair.
Mr. Uyeda has also moved to scale back the S.E.C.’s crypto enforcement unit, which had been staffed by more than 50 lawyers and investigators. Some lawyers have been moved to other enforcement teams, and a top lawyer on many crypto cases was moved entirely out of the enforcement division — action seem by some as payback to the crypto community.
And on Tuesday, Mr. Uyeda informed a federal appellate court that the agency was pausing its defense of a rule that would require public companies to disclose how their operations affect climate change. Many U.S. companies have complained that the rule is too costly to carry out. Supporters of climate disclosures consider the rule among Mr. Gensler’s signature achievements.
Mr. Trump’s regulatory rollback also potentially extends to the S.E.C.’s enforcement of corporate corruption overseas. On Monday, he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for U.S. companies to bribe foreign officials to get government contracts, and is enforced by both the S.E.C. and Department of Justice. One of the biggest foreign bribery cases in recent years was an investigation that led to a Goldman Sachs subsidiary’s entering a guilty plea in the 1MDB scandal.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
At the E.E.O.C., the federal agency focused on protecting employees from discrimination, cases related to transgender workers are now in doubt.
Last month, lawyers for the agency asked a judge to pause litigation in a case accusing a hog farm of discriminating against a transgender employee, including by failing to stop another worker from trying to grope her breasts and expose his own genitalia. The pause in the case, lawyers told the judge, “will permit the E.E.O.C. to determine whether its continued litigation” is permitted under Mr. Trump’s executive order related to “Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
In a statement, a spokesman for the E.E.O.C. said “the agency continues to enforce federal antidiscrimination laws.”
But he added that the agency’s acting chair “has acted promptly to comply with applicable executive orders to the fullest extent possible under her existing authority.”
The order leaves in doubt what will happen to other transgender discrimination cases, like one the E.E.O.C. brought in September against a chain of hotels. The commission charged the companies with illegally firing a transgender housekeeper who complained about being subjected to harassment.
In announcing that lawsuit, a regional E.E.O.C. attorney said: “Preventing and remedying discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ individuals remain key priorities for the E.E.O.C.”
But Mr. Trump has made it clear that he has other priorities. Shortly after issuing the “biological truth” executive order, the Trump administration fired two of the agency’s Democratic commissioners and its general counsel.
Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.
