Scott grew up in Baltimore, in his eighties and nineties, “thinking that the government was an honorable place to work.” His grandparents were the Westinghouse engineers who conducted the state -funded research. His parents were teachers of music at the public school. He told me: “The children used to make fun of me to carry the violin.” In college, he joined ROTC and later entered the air force. His wife, a nuclear missile, met at the common duty station in California. Both left the active service, but he continued to work in the Air Force reserves and went to the Law College.
In 2013, he obtained a job as lawyer at the Consumer Protection Office, the Federal Agency that monitors and investigates banks, lenders on payment day, debt collectors and other companies. CFPB was created in 2010, under the Dodd-Rank Law, which sought to prevent the types of mortgage fraud and unorganized investments that led to the great recession. “My specialty was a homogeneous services to lock, the people who are struggling to obtain adjustments to the mortgage,” said Scott. (He asked to use a pseudonym because he is not allowed to speak with the press.) Later, he joined a team that focuses on soldiers, which is the population of particularly exposed to predators because of the nature of their work – the institute but an reliable income, and the peer pressure on the purchase of “the largest truck.” Many recruits marry young people and have young children, or have to support their parents. He told me: “They get money for the first time.” “They get prey.”
Scott loved the idea of helping the military society, and he knew that his position as a veteran expert had given him an advantage in CFPB “he made me in the door”, although he still had to take an admission exam. The inventors of warriors often receive a preference for government employment and promotions, which partially explains the reason for their formation of about thirty percent of the federal workforce. “The preference is trying to bring us back to where we will be, if we do not serve,” Scott said. “It is stadium levels.”
He has worked with CFPB since then. The agency filed a lawsuit against companies to persuade old warriors to sell their pension payments and disabilities, to charge military families more than thirty -six percent for the loans of Pedic, and for the misleading soldiers to obtain costly cash financing loans on their homes. He recalled the cases where the debt mosque had stayed outside a person’s house, pretending that his mobile phone was a police device, or passed by car from the Taco bell to harass someone working on the window. Since its foundation, CFPB has regained more than three hundred million dollars as compensation for military personnel and old warriors.
I visited SCOTT last week at his home an hour away from the capital, and he looks part of a pilot: tall, suitable, and repeated quickly. The house was also large and bound, with the exception of the area occupied by two Chihauhasas Yappe. Show me the dining room, which doubles as his office. Next to the laptop from the work, there was a binding version of the fair credit reporting, whose green green cover was signed in Sharpie, by a CFPB founder:
In early February, the Trump administration closed the agency’s headquarters. Elon Musk announced that he is dead – “Rip CFPB”, written on X – like him Dodge A process of digging into computer systems. “Employees should not come to the office.” Wrote in the e -mail “Allhands” by e -mail. “Employees must stop performing any work task.” Then he launched ten percent of the office and supervised the “end of the sentence for the necessary contracts to maintain the operation of CFPB”, and he mentioned a purchasing employee in a modern written certificate. The Vogue Plan was stopped to end almost everyone in the agency “within 36 hours” by a federal judge.
Scott was rescued but placed on an administrative leave. He can do more than just check his email and wait. It usually analyzes complaints from service, organizing awareness events, and discussing emerging concerns with colleagues in the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Old Warriors Affairs. Now nothing has been done.
Several West time areas, in Honolulu, the financial coach and the military husband named Heidi Cleimms was concerned about the news about CFPB. The material package provided to the service and families is filled with links and references to the agency. She told me: “We are trying to direct us from our service to the most reliable information-history, supported by government, permanent, not a fraud or profit based.” Suddenly, in February, the links led to a “non -existent” page. All YouTube explained. “It was a hot chaos,” she said. “We had to pull CFPB from all of our resources.” Although the site recovered later, she did not want to withstand the risk of sending people to a “dead end”. She said: “The effect of closing CFPB on our service – it’s huge.”
Scott was in this part of Ouho for military training. Fort Shafter sits between fog and dark green mountains for Koo’olau and Ke’ehi Lagon. “There are many armed companies,” he said. In criticism of gold, address loans, pawns. There are high -tech temptations, also: encryption and various money committee plans on Venmo, Zelle and other pair payment applications.
Military individuals have always been vulnerable to shaded institutions and negatives. Twenty years ago, the government accountability office conducted a study of the Ministry of Defense, based on “ongoing concerns about the use of predatory consumer loans.” The report found that these products can lead to “severe negative consequences for the army as a whole (for example, decreased in the willingness of unity and morale) as well as to serve themselves (for example, the actions of criminal and harmful employees, including potential secretions from the army).” Cleimmons told me that she had one agent who stole her husband with her identity; That there are other money, owe money to a shark loan; And that the residential complexes near the base placed the military applicants to “waive their rights” under the Civil Relief Act of Service, which allows active tenants to violate the lease contract when necessary. In 2023, out of eighty -four thousand complaints or so on from Servicememers to CFPB, the second highest number of Hawaii came.
Earlier this year, its headquarters in Fort Shafter – the leadership support for the ninth mission of the Army Reserve (Al -Shaar: “Pacific Pride”) – CFPB representative to Kiosk in a resource exhibition for soldiers and their families. Arrange Scott for Labor Psalm to be with a lot of office literature and SWAG. The event occurred on the first of March, but a delegate never appeared – because no one was allowed to work. “They did not know where we are,” Scott said.
On Sunday, March 2, Scott and other remaining employees received a confusing e -mail from Mark Paulta, chief legal official at CFPB:
