CFPB removes 15 years of data

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau removed older newsroom material from its website on May 19, 2026, according to a notice now posted at the top of its newsroom page. The note says “Newsroom items published before February 2025 were removed on May 19, 2026,” leaving only material from the current administration period visible in that section. Scotsman Guide reported on May 21 that the deleted material included newsroom items, speeches, blog posts, public statements and informal guidance dating back roughly 15 years. ### What exactly disappeared? The CFPB newsroom now starts with items published in 2025 and 2026, including a March 31, 2026 press release on HMDA mortgage-lending data and a January 12, 2026 release on a joint fair-lending statement. The newsroom notice makes clear that items published before February 2025 were removed from that section on May 19. Scotsman Guide said the sweep covered older speeches, blog posts, public statements and informal guidance in addition to newsroom entries. (consumerfinance.gov) Bloomberg Law separately reported that the bureau deleted public statements issued before the Trump administration took control of the agency. That account aligns with the CFPB’s own posted cutoff date and with Scotsman Guide’s description of the removed categories. ### Is all CFPB data gone? The CFPB still has active public-facing data and update pages online. (consumerfinance.gov) Its “Recent updates” page lists reports and releases through May 2026, including the 2025 Consumer Response Annual Report, the 2025 Financial Literacy Annual Report and other bureau publications. The HMDA platform, which is operated through the FFIEC and CFPB, also remains live and says the 2025 modified loan application register data was released on March 31, 2026. (news.bloomberglaw.com) The distinction matters because the removal appears to target historical website content and prior interpretive material, not every live federal dataset tied to the bureau. The newsroom notice refers specifically to “Newsroom items,” while the activity log and HMDA platform continue to show current records and data tools. ### Why are critics focused on old speeches and guidance? (consumerfinance.gov) Scotsman Guide reported that critics described the move as “highly disturbing” because lenders, lawyers, researchers and compliance teams have long used archived CFPB statements and guidance to understand how the bureau explained rules and enforcement priorities over time. The publication said experts warned that deleting historical materials could undermine regulatory understanding and market transparency. (consumerfinance.gov) The concern comes after a separate CFPB action in May 2025 rescinding 67 guidance documents, according to legal analyses by Holland & Knight and other regulatory law publications. Those documents spanned more than 14 years, and some related to the bureau’s public consumer complaint database and other compliance questions. ### Why does this matter beyond mortgage and banking specialists? (scotsmanguide.com) Federal websites are often treated as durable source material by academics, journalists, software vendors, compliance teams and startups that build products on top of public information. When an agency removes historical pages without preserving the same access path, research workflows, citations, internal models and customer-facing tools can all break at once. That is an inference from how such systems are commonly used, supported here by the categories of material Scotsman Guide said were removed and by the CFPB’s continued separation of current datasets from older website content. (hklaw.com) The CFPB’s own site now offers current publications through its activity log and current mortgage-lending data through HMDA, but the newsroom notice indicates the pre-February 2025 archive is no longer available there. For anyone relying on federal web pages as a stable historical record, that change is already in effect. ### What should readers watch next? May 19, 2026 is the operative date on the bureau’s newsroom notice, and May 21 is the date Scotsman Guide published its report on the removals. (scotsmanguide.com) The next concrete check is whether the CFPB restores an archive, issues an explanation, or leaves researchers to rely on other repositories and cached records while current materials continue to post on the activity log and HMDA platform. (consumerfinance.gov)