Scott grew up in Baltimore, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, “thinking that the government was an honorable place to work.” His grandfathers were Westinghouse engineers who conducted state-funded research. His parents were public-school music teachers. “Kids used to make fun of me for carrying a violin,” he told me. In college, he joined the R.O.T.C. and later entered the Air Force. He met his wife, a nuclear missileer, at their shared duty station in California. They both left active duty, but he continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve and went on to law school.
In 2013, he got a job as an attorney-investigator at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that monitors and investigates banks, payday lenders, debt collectors, and other businesses. The C.F.P.B. was established in 2010, under the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to prevent the kinds of mortgage scams and unregulated investments that had led to the Great Recession. “My specialty was delinquent-loan services, people struggling to get mortgage modifications,” Scott said. (He asked to use a pseudonym because he is not permitted to speak with the press.) Later, he joined a team that focusses on servicemembers, a population that’s particularly vulnerable to predatory practices because of the nature of their work—modest but dependable income, frequent relocation, peer pressure to buy “the biggest truck.” A lot of enlisteds get married young and have kids young, or have to support their parents. “They are getting money for the first time,” he told me. “They get preyed on.”
Scott liked the idea of helping the military community, and knew that his own status as a veteran had given him an advantage at the C.F.P.B. “It got me in the door,” he said, though he still had to take an entrance exam. Veterans often receive a preference in government hiring and promotions, which partly explains why they make up about thirty per cent of the federal workforce. “The preference tries to put us back where we would be, had we not served,” Scott said. “It levels the playing field.”
He has worked for the C.F.P.B. ever since. The agency has sued companies for persuading veterans to sell their pension and disability payments, for charging military families more than thirty-six per cent interest on pawn loans, and for misleading servicemembers to take costly cash-out refinance loans on their homes. He recalled cases in which a debt collector had lingered outside someone’s house, pretending that his cellphone was a police walkie-talkie, or gone through the drive-thru of a Taco Bell to harass someone working the window. Since its founding, the C.F.P.B. has recovered more than three hundred million dollars in damages to military personnel and veterans.
I visited Scott last week at his home about an hour away from D.C. He looks the part of an airman: tall, fit, and fastidiously groomed. The house was also big and spotless, save for the area occupied by two yappy Chihauahas. He showed me the dining room, which doubles as his office. Next to his work laptop was a bound copy of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, whose worn lime-green cover was signed, in Sharpie, by one of the creators of the C.F.P.B.:
In early February, the Trump Administration had shut down the agency headquarters. Elon Musk pronounced it dead—“RIP CFPB,” he wrote on X—as his DOGE operation dug into the computer systems. “Employees should not come into the office,” Russell Vought, an outspoken critic of financial regulation and the C.F.P.B.’s new acting director, wrote in an “AllHands” e-mail. “Employees should stand down from performing any work task.” He then fired ten per cent of the bureau and oversaw a “wholesale termination of the contracts needed to keep the C.F.P.B. running,” a procurement staffer stated in a recent affidavit. Vought’s plan to terminate nearly everyone at the agency “within 36 hours” was halted by a federal judge.
Scott was spared but put on administrative leave. He could do little more than check his e-mail and wait. Normally he would be analyzing the complaints submitted by servicemembers, organizing outreach events, and discussing emerging concerns with colleagues at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now nothing was getting done.
Several time zones west, in Honolulu, a financial coach and military spouse named Heidi Clemons was feeling alarmed by the news about the C.F.P.B. The packet of materials she gave to servicemembers and families was filled with links and references to the agency. “We’re trying to point our servicemembers to the most trusted information—historic, government-backed, lasting, not scam-based or profit-based,” she told me. Suddenly, in February, the links led to a “Page Not Found” message. All the YouTube explainers were gone. “It was a hot mess,” she said. “We had to pull the C.F.P.B. from all our resourcing.” Though the website was later restored, she didn’t want to take the risk of sending people to “a dead-end link.” “The impact of shutting down the C.F.P.B. on our servicemembers—it’s huge,” she said.
Scott had been to that part of Oahu for military exercises. Fort Shafter sits between the misty, dark-green mountains of the Ko’olau Range and the Ke’ehi Lagoon. “There’s a lot of sleazy businesses,” he said. Cash for gold, title loans, pawnshops. There are high-tech temptations, too: crypto and various money-making schemes on Venmo, Zelle, and other peer-to-peer payment apps.
Military personnel have long been vulnerable to shady enterprises and cons. Twenty years ago, the Government Accountability Office conducted a study for the Defense Department, based on “continuing concerns about servicemembers’ use of predatory consumer loans.” The report found that these products could lead to “severe negative consequences for the military as a whole (e.g., decreases in unit readiness and morale) as well as for the servicemembers themselves (e.g., criminal and adverse personnel actions, including possible discharge from the military).” Clemons told me that she had one client whose husband had stolen her identity; that another, a Reservist, owed money to a loan shark; and that apartment complexes near the base were having military applicants “waive away their rights” under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which allows active-duty renters to break their lease when necessary. In 2023, of the eighty-four thousand or so complaints submitted by servicemembers to the C.F.P.B., the second-highest number came from Hawaii.
Earlier this year, a unit based at Fort Shafter—the 9th Mission Support Command of the Army Reserve (motto: “Pride of the Pacific”)—had asked for a C.F.P.B. representative to staff a booth at an upcoming resource fair for soldiers and their families. Scott arranged for a co-worker to be there with plenty of bureau literature and swag. The event took place on March 1st, but the rep never showed up—because no one was allowed to work. “They didn’t know where we were,” Scott said.
On Sunday, March 2nd, Scott and other remaining staffers received a confusing e-mail from Mark Paoletta, the C.F.P.B.’s chief legal officer:
A month earlier, Vought’s message had clearly said not to perform “any work” at all. Scott and other C.F.P.B. employees concluded that this new directive was an attempt to rewrite the story for purposes of litigation. A lawsuit filed by the workers’ union alleged that by issuing a stop-work order to all staff the Administration had violated the Dodd-Frank Act. A hearing was scheduled for the following day. “They’re trying to develop cover for the court case,” Scott told me.
Meanwhile, the invitation to do what was “statutorily required” let him resume some of his work. “I currently have three hundred and twenty-three unread e-mails,” he told me. “Usually, I try to clear them out as fast as I can.” We were in his dining room, sitting at a table covered in delicate white lace. He sipped coffee from a Pentagon mug. The complaint system for servicemembers and veterans had continued to function through the pause, though with noticeable glitches, and Scott was finally able to download the latest data. “Our all-time record is ten thousand complaints for any month,” he said. “And then January was nineteen thousand!” A lot of the submissions had to do with credit reporting. Late last year, the C.F.P.B. had forced Navy Federal, a credit union with a large presence on military installations, to return eighty-one million dollars in overdraft fees to consumers. Scott guessed that the settlement had prompted fresh complaints about other institutions.
But he wasn’t able to track the complaints as he normally would. Typically, when a complaint comes in, it is both reviewed by the C.F.P.B. and routed to the relevant financial company, which is then obligated to respond, and often does so through e-mail with an attached PDF. The many contracts Vought had cancelled, however, included one “with a software company who would scan all our documents for viruses,” Scott explained. “So, now we’re not able to open attachments.” What this meant, he continued, was that “Nobody’s monitoring, right now, to make sure the responses are timely or that they’re complete.” He shrugged.
We got in the car and drove southeast, past the main gate of Fort Meade, past a Northrop Grumman campus, past a strip mall advertising cheap tax preparation. “Some people get loans against their tax refunds—I worry about that,” he told me. I asked him what the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Defense might do to help members of the military, if the C.F.P.B. no longer could. “I mean, not a lot,” Scott said. “For some things, the servicemembers could go to their JAG”—the military’s law department—“and the JAG might write a letter, but that’s about all they’re going to do.”
Enough of the agency was still intact that Scott believed it could be brought back to life. The day after my visit, a federal judge in Maryland ruled that thousands of fired federal workers, including those at the C.F.P.B., would have to be temporarily reinstated; the Trump Administration appealed the order. Some probationary workers subsequently received a “notice of rehiring” that put them on paid administrative leave. Though Scott had recently interviewed for jobs in a city prosecutor’s office and at a credit union in need of a compliance officer, he still hoped to return to the bureau. “If this blows over, I can come back,” he said. He hated to think what would happen if the agency went away completely. “You’re going to see a boom and bust in crypto. You might see a recession,” he told me. “We’re gonna see foreclosures. People forget that. People don’t remember what that’s like.” ♦
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