Takeaways from our data demo for journalists
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an independent bureau that is part of the Federal Reserve System. It was created in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession to provide federal oversight of consumer financial products and services, in order to prevent another economic crisis.
While the agency has been in turmoil under the second Trump administration, it remains a rich source of data, particularly on consumer complaints, for reporters covering personal finance and consumer issues.
We recently convened a hands-on demo of CFPB data with Erie Meyer, who served as the CFPB’s first chief technologist from 2021 to 2025, and Joel Jacobs, a data reporter for ProPublica who has mined the consumer complaint database for stories.
“Credit reporting complaints — people complaining about potential issues with their credit reports — have been exploding in recent years,” Jacobs said. “They’re really, by far, the most common complaint in the CFPB database.”
A brief recent history of the CFPB
The database is active and available, though most of the agency’s supervisory activities, such as suing companies for illegal activities surfaced through complaints, have halted.
“There is currently a stand-down order and a way to report staffers at the CFPB if they’re caught doing their jobs,” Meyer said. “So the complaint system is working but the internal parts of the CFPB that are supposed to use the complaints are not working — and is one of the reasons why it’s so important that states and other enforcers are using this data.”
This cheat sheet Meyer created will help you find the CFPB data you need.
The CFPB is an executive branch agency, and the president appoints its director, who must be confirmed by the Senate.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has served as acting CFPB director since February 2025. Prior to President Donald Trump’s second administration, Vought was best known as a primary author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, widely seen as a blueprint for Trump to implement severe cuts to federal government agencies and services.
Last month, the Trump administration announced a plan to reduce headcount at the agency from 1,700 to 500. Ken Sweet of the Associated Press wrote that the CFPB has “largely become inoperable.” Trump previously tried to reduce staff to 200, a move blocked by a federal judge last April.
If you don’t have time to watch the full webinar, keep reading for key takeaways, including insights about the consumer complaint database, spotting trends in the data and more.
And here’s a bonus tip: If you’re hitting resistance from the press office, that doesn’t mean every part of the agency is unhelpful. The staffers in the CFPB Freedom of Information Act office, for example, are dedicated and responsive, Meyer said.
1. CFPB data remains trustworthy and contains rich narratives.
Despite the staffing upheaval at the CFPB, the agency’s consumer complaint data is up and running.
Those complaint records are not like the online rants of someone with an unverified grudge against a business. Companies confirm that the complainant was their customer before complaints are published, Meyer said. The CFPB also gets consent from customers to publish their complaint narratives.
“Cranky people — you would imagine you would have an equal distribution of those types of people in the complaint data — so it is a really interesting view of confirmed customers and what their experiences are with these financial products,” Meyer said.
To search the database, Meyer advises thinking of terms that non-journalists would use.
For example, to identify complaints from people with lower incomes who might be having financial difficulties, search “groceries,” “bread,” “milk” or “formula.”
“You’ll see people who are really struggling just to survive describe what their interactions are with the financial system, because they say, ‘I was trying to buy milk, and all of my cards were turned off, and I couldn’t get a human on the phone to tell me why,’” Meyer said.
2. Journalists can use CFPB data to find stories and hold financial institutions accountable.
If you have coding experience, Jacobs recommends downloading the complaint data in bulk and using languages like Python, R or SQL to explore it. In looking at the data over several years, Jacobs identified two major credit bureaus with a lower share of complaints resolved in favor of customers since the second Trump administration.
But you don’t have to have coding experience to find trends in the data, he said. The CFPB also provides a dashboard of aggregate information with graphics and other visualizations, which are “a great way to do initial explorations,” Jacobs said.
The narrative elements of the complaint data are particularly unique and useful. In reporting a story about Tribal lenders charging triple-digit interest rates, Jacobs used the narratives to identify how those rates were harming customers.
He also noted that financial firms may use different company names for different financial products, or that consumer complaints in other databases might use slightly different spellings for the same company name — but within the CFPB data, the agency attempts to standardize company names.
Standardization of company names “helps a lot as you you’re doing data explorations,” Jacobs said. “This really helped us identify the big players, potential big players, in this in this space.”
3. The CFPB data is great for anecdotes — but lawsuits are better for finding sources.
CFPB data is anonymized. Customer complaint narratives are descriptively rich, but you won’t find sources through them. But bankruptcy cases and lawsuits over unresolved issues are great ways to find contact information for lawyers and, ultimately, their clients.
Take the lead anecdote in Jacobs’ story on credit bureaus dismissing consumer complaints — an accountant in Colorado beset by a lingering $240,000 student loan that wasn’t hers.
“Contacting attorneys is actually how I found her, because she ended up suing the credit bureaus because she couldn’t get her issue fixed,” Jacobs said.
4. State-level enforcement is more important than ever for accountability journalism.
With CFPB enforcement drying up under the current administration, journalists should turn to states as another source of data and to understand local enforcement trends.
These may include municipal consumer protection agencies and state attorney general offices. There are 176 federal and state agencies that handle consumer complaints in the U.S., according to a December 2025 analysis from Meyer. Many of them, especially state attorneys general, still rely on CFPB data to identify illegal activities in their states.
“Twenty-four different state attorneys general have sued the CFPB to have them keep this system operating, because they all rely on our complaint database for their enforcement,” Meyer said.
