Comprehensive Impacts of Trump’s Second Year: Consumer Protections
This publication is meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of the Trump administration. There are many things that happened during the campaign that are not included. For this series covering the second year, impacts from about January 20, 2018, to January 31, 2019, are included. An introduction to this year’s series is here.
You can read the complete series on the first year of the administration here.
There are sure to be things missing, but I have done my best to record these impacts. The impacts are compiled under 20 different categories, or articles:
1. Cabinet and Other Appointments;
3. Women & Families;
4. LBGT;
6. Ethics;
7. Targeting free press/free speech/Privacy;
8. Health & Safety;
9. Consumer Protections;
10. Education;
11. Transportation/Infrastructure/Housing;
12. Immigration;
13. Social Contract;
14. Business/Economy;
15. Budget;
16. General Governance;
17. Character;
18. Military/Defense/Police;
19. World; and
20. Some good news. Because there is always some good news.
Since this series takes a long time to write, I will publish each section as I complete it. This article is on Trump’s impacts on consumer protections.
Consumer Protections
Trump was successful at demolishing the foundation of consumer protections by effectively dissolving the Consumer Advisory Board under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when acting director of the Bureau Mick Mulvaney fired all 25 members after some criticized the Mulvaney’s leadership. The director of the Bureau was required by law to meet with the Advisory Board twice a year. The Board was composed of experts on predatory lending, fair housing, legal aid, and community development. If that wasn’t enough, Trump had a federal judge rule that the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau must be eliminated.
· Without any consumer protections, Congress allowed airlines to continue collecting record fees from customers. They dropped from the FAA reauthorization a provision that would have allowed the Department of Transportation to determine whether fees are “reasonable and proportional.”
· Congress (with support from some moderate Democrats!!!) passed legislation that further weakens Dodd-Frank, which put in place regulations on banks after the banking crisis. The new law in part exempts certain banks from being subject to yearly stress tests and the Volckner Rule, which prohibits banks from making risky wagers.
· Trump has also given temporary reprieves to five banks with criminal convictions for manipulating interest rates used for loans around the world, including a big lender to Trump. The reprieve allows them to continue managing pension funds and individual retirement accounts that they otherwise would have had to shut down after their convictions.
· Banks seem to have much more leeway under Trump. Bank of America started asking account holders questions about their citizenship and freezing accounts with no warning.
· Thanks to Trump, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the official in charge of protecting student loan borrowers from predatory lending practices, resigned. In his resignation letter, he stated that the Trump administration “turned its back on young people and their financial futures.” He also said that under the current leadership, “the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting” and has “used he Bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America.
· Also potential for financial chaos, Trump had a federal appeals court strike down a Labor Department rule passed by President Obama that required financial investment advisors to act in the best interests of their clients, eliminating the fiduciary rule.
· Overall, Trump imposed fewer penalties on corporations that broke the law or violated regulations than previous presidents. In 11 of 12 federal agencies, “penalties against corporate violators dropped by at least 50 percent under the oversight of Trump-appointed officials.”
· Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency closed down the National Center for Environmental Research. One of the jobs done here was to support scientists investigating the effects of chemical exposure on health, including the implications of air pollution, interactions between climate change and air quality, and environmental effects on children’s health. The Center also supported prevention and treatment of childhood asthma, preterm births, leukemia, immune disorders, and obesity, among others.
· Trump is also planning to reclassify high-level radioactive waste leftover from the production of nuclear weapons to make it cheaper to dispose of.
· Trump’s Department of Agriculture withdrew a rule set by President Obama that set new standards for the way animals should be treated if their meat is going to be labeled as “certified organic.”
· Trump is also trying to limit the warning labels on junk food as part of the NAFTA negotiations. This is opposite of the direction other countries, which have passed or are trying to pass strict regulations that include warning labels on the front of certain food packages in an effort to combat obesity rates, which have doubled in more than 70 countries since 1980.
· Most concerning, Trump is trying to extinguish the regulations in place to protect food safety and “undermining the people who work to keep our food safe” by refusing to enforce the updated FDA and Department of Agriculture’s water testing requirements. But more importantly, Trump’s anti-immigration policies have disrupted food safety practices, resulting in increased outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella.
· Under Trump, the Senate passed a bill to roll back policies to protect minority car buyers from discriminatory loan terms.
· Labor rights also suffered attacks under Trump. His Supreme Court ruled that employers are allowed to take away workers’ right to sue collectively, effectively eliminating employees’ ability to recover wages in court that their employers underpaid them. As writer Mark Joseph Stern wrote, this decision is “a frontal attack on the New Deal” and “effectively legalized wage left.”
· Trump’s Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality, which prohibited internet companies from arbitrarily lowering bandwidth or charging a lot more for a little more bandwidth. They also explicitly banned states from implementing their own net neutrality laws.
The next article will cover Trump’s impacts on education.
