The news: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to continue funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until an appeals court hearing in February.

Zoom out: In early 2025, acting director Russell Vought weakened the CFPB by ordering a halt to supervision, enforcement, rulemaking, investigations, and public communications. Employees were locked out of headquarters and final rules’ effective dates suspended. With new funding cut off, the CFPB’s future has been in limbo.

The Trump administration’s actions created uncertainty over updates to banks’ obligations under consumer protection laws. Those included rules concerning open banking and small business lending data collection, which had raised objections among financial institutions over allegedly burdensome compliance requirements and, in the case of the open banking rule, threats to banks’ control over data. Later in 2025, President Trump signed resolutions that overturned the CFPB’s overdraft fee caps and expanded authority over digital payments.

Our take: Regulatory rulemaking and enforcement of the financial industry are relatively loose under the current administration. But the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-led blitzkrieg is long over. The courts are catching up to a backlog of lawsuits against first-year executive actions, some of which have been codified in law.

Regulatory changes in traditional financial services (separate from the administration’s very permissive crypto agenda) are starting to appear as they might under another administration with a deregulatory agenda, although to some constituencies, the apparent endgame is extreme. The dust is still settling, with some rules reopened for public comment after being finalized by the Biden administration. What financial rules will look like over the next few years is starting to come into relief.