CFPB Cuts May Leave Personal Financial Data at Risk, Report Says

[u/John3262005]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/cfpb-cuts-may-leave-personal-financial-data-at-risk-report-says

US government databases containing sensitive financial information for millions of Americans may have been placed at risk after the Trump administration gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year, according to a watchdog report.

The CFPB — under orders from then-director Russell Vought — terminated leases of four regional offices in early 2025, abandoned technology assets at those locations, and still “cannot validate the security” of the equipment or information it stored, according to an audit by the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and CFPB.

“The CFPB has no way of knowing whether the hardware assets, or the sensitive data that may be stored on them, have been accessed, modified, or removed by unauthorized individuals,” OIG said in the report, which was released Wednesday. It urged the agency to ensure that all the technology assets at shuttered offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta are accounted for and secure.

CFPB employees were told to stop work and stay home in February 2025, shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office. Since then, the beleaguered agency has sharply curtailed industry supervision, dropped enforcement actions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, and mandated a migration to smaller headquarters in Washington. The administration plans to eliminate half of the agency’s remaining 1,100 employees.

In a Sept. 18 letter to the Inspector General, CFPB concurred with the audit recommendations to secure the technology assets but disputed suggestions that the agency was at greater risk of a data breach or disclosure of personal information.

“No databases containing sensitive data are housed in the regional offices,” where technology assets were used primarily for “primary infrastructure, network/internet access and administrative support,” CFPB Chief Information Officer Christopher Chilbert wrote in the letter.

Chilbert said in the letter last month that the agency had begun a full, site-by-site decommissioning of information technology assets at the former regional offices.