Rohit Chopra became one of the most powerful financial regulators by combining bark and bite. As director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he has attacked—often with a hammer—the perpetrators of what he sees as injustices against ordinary Americans.
When the agency fined Wells Fargo $3.7 billion last year for violations including improperly foreclosing on some borrowers’ homes, Chopra accused the bank of a “rinse-repeat cycle of violating of the law.” When it sued MoneyGram that same year over delays in transferring customers’ money, Chopra said he wanted to go beyond fines and impose a penalty deep enough to “stop repeated violations of the law.” And in a lawsuit against TransUnion, again in 2022, over deceptive sales tactics, Chopra took the rare step of targeting not just the credit reporting agency, but also one of its senior managers.
That aggressive approach has made Chopra a hero to consumer interests and a scourge to the banks and other lenders his agency oversees.
“Wall Street can always attack the CFPB, but their opposition has reached, shall we say, insane levels with Rohit Chopra at the helm,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who heads the Senate Banking Committee.
Now the future of the agency that Chopra has wielded as a cudgel to change the behavior of the financial industry is under threat — and with it some of Chopra’s biggest victories.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could upend the agency and the market it regulates. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled last year that the agency’s funding structure, which uses direct transfers from the Federal Reserve, is unconstitutional. It concluded that all actions taken by the agency in its twelve years of existence should be “reversed.”
If the Supreme Court agrees that the agency’s funding is inappropriate, it could at least force the agency to rely on appropriations from Congress. Or the court could follow the 5th Circuit’s suggestion and strike down everything the agency has done to date.
Chopra — who at 41 is one of Washington’s youngest regulatory overseers — claimed to be optimistic about the attack on his agency’s power. “I think this is what you should expect when you do your job,” he said.
His opponents are destructive. In an op-ed essay, Rob Nichols, CEO of the American Bankers Association, criticized the agency’s “politicized enforcement binge,” calling it “a regulator gone rogue.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business lobbying group, launched a six-figure online ad campaign to denounce Chopra’s “radical agenda and reckless actions.”
In a speech last year at the Exchequer Club, a Washington-based group focused on economics and finance, Richard Hunt, a former CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association, said he suspected Chopra “hates banks.”
“He has preconceived opinions about banks, and that’s just not healthy,” Hunt said.
Chopra claimed he harbored no such prejudices. “I like to be quite direct,” he says. “The CFPB does not group companies into good and bad companies. We look at law-abiding versus disobedient, and look for a market that is what the law says: fair, transparent, competitive.”
He is uniquely motivated to act quickly, both personally and professionally. An ongoing battle with cancer reminds him of two things every day: the dedication of his work and the urgency to see it through to a successful conclusion.
Chopra was born in New Jersey and raised by first-generation immigrants from India in a suburb just across the border from Philadelphia. His mother, a physician, teaches geriatric medicine, and his father had various jobs in engineering and construction.
He graduated from Harvard University before attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2009, while completing his MBA degree, he studied the housing crisis as it unfolded and was fascinated by the professors who accurately predicted the dynamics of the crisis. That experience shattered for him any belief that the country’s regulatory standards were worth maintaining.
“The fact that there were so many warning signs that went unheeded — it’s still, I can’t, I still can’t fully understand that,” Chopra said. “There is no doubt that the way financial companies have been supervised for a long time has been a failure.”
The consumer agency was created through the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law enacted in response to the 2007 financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. When Elizabeth Warren—who had just succeeded in her quest to convince Congress that Washington needed a new financial regulator—began recruiting for the fledgling consumer agency, Chopra sent his resume.
Warren eagerly hired him in 2010. They had crossed paths before at Harvard; Chopra was one of the few students who registered on the famed law professor’s radar.
“The president of Harvard pointed him out to me,” Warren recalled. “We talked about students who know early on what battle they want to fight. She told me about Rohit, and I met him and I was just knocked down.
Colleagues from those early days – including some who later became close allies – remember Chopra as intense and sometimes unpleasantly brash.
“I thought he was a careerist, a fast-talking and heavy-handed person who I wouldn’t like,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer who worked at the firm for a year. “I quickly realized that the first impression was completely wrong: he cares deeply about this work.”
The consumer agency initially focused on creating new guardrails for the mortgage industry that had just imploded. Chopra was drawn to another area: student loans. It was a market that few in Washington paid any attention to, even as borrower debt levels skyrocketed.
The Dodd-Frank Act required the consumer agency to appoint an ombudsman to handle borrowers’ complaints about their student loans. Chopra was the obvious choice for the job, said Wally Adeyemo, who was the consumer bureau’s first chief of staff and now serves as deputy treasury secretary.
He was “completely out of central casting – he was both a very smart young man who cared deeply about these issues, and he could articulate why not only protecting individual students made sense, but also why this made sense for the economy,” said Adeyemo.
Once he got into the job, Chopra made a signature move: He ignored the legal boundaries of the position and changed the role to a much broader role. The law Congress wrote tasked the agency’s ombudsman with overseeing private education loans — a roughly 10% slice of a market dominated by federal loans. Chopra focused instead on those government-backed loans, and he quickly became a thorn in the side of the Department of Education, which he liked to describe as “a K-12 policy shop with a bank of one billion.” trillion dollars tied to it.”
Chopra pushed the department to step up enforcement against powerful groups that had long taken advantage of lax federal oversight and publicly shamed them.
A crackdown he helped instigate toppled the Corinthian Colleges and the ITT Technical Institute, two giants in the for-profit education world accused of illegal recruitment tactics. A series of damning regulatory reports on student loan deficiencies — combined with a still-active lawsuit the consumer agency filed against Navient, then one of the largest federal servicers — led to legislative changes and stricter oversight that have undermined some of the worst problems. abuse.
Industry leaders were outraged at being chased by an overseer with tusks. Shortly before ITT went bankrupt, the CEO sent an email to his corporate lawyers describing Chopra as an “economic terrorist” who “should be sent to Guantánamo Bay for about a decade of R&R; which should include an aggressive regime of ‘water sports’!”
“Part of me wishes Rohit could run virtually any federal agency,” said David Halperin, a Washington lawyer and longtime advocate of higher education financing reform. “Wherever he goes, he has not hesitated to utilize the full extent of the powers available to him, and actually use them, which is rare.”
Chopra left the consumer agency in 2015 for a brief stint at the Department of Education and then joined Hillary Clinton’s transition team in anticipation of a role in her administration. But the election of Donald Trump as president put an end to these plans – and within days, Chopra’s personal life collapsed as well.
During a doctor’s visit, his doctor discovered what she suspected was a cyst. Overwhelmed with planning for Clinton’s presidency, Chopra scheduled an ultrasound for the day after Election Day, thinking he would be running to work. Instead, he found himself in an unexpected career wilderness, finding himself unemployed for the first time in his adult life and diagnosed with late-stage thyroid cancer.
“People can really get hit with a bunch of bricks at the same time,” he said. Major surgery and radiation followed. Chopra rarely speaks about his health problems, but they remain a part of his life.
“You’re still working through it,” he said. “I mean, I’m not in remission. But you just keep going. I will be ok.”
Late last year, the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a ruling that ripped through Washington like a bolt of lightning.
Trade groups representing payday lenders had challenged an agency rule that would have restricted some of their activities, such as repeatedly trying to withdraw money from borrowers’ empty bank accounts. They threw out a litany of objections in their brief, including an argument that the consumer agency’s funding structure was unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit agreed, ruling that the payday rule was therefore invalid and should be overturned.
By attacking a weak rule that affected a large but limited industry, the lenders had found a court willing to strike at the foundations of every regulatory and enforcement action the agency had ever imposed. Many legal scholars were baffled. The decision is “playing with matches,” said Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Since the 5th Circuit’s ruling, more than a dozen companies, including MoneyGram, have sought to have lawsuits or penalties against them dismissed. The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week on the consumer agency’s appeal of the 5th Circuit’s ruling.
When the agency fined Wells Fargo $3.7 billion last year for violations including improperly foreclosing on some borrowers’ homes, Chopra accused the bank of a “rinse-repeat cycle of violating of the law.” When it sued MoneyGram that same year over delays in transferring customers’ money, Chopra said he wanted to go beyond fines and impose a penalty deep enough to “stop repeated violations of the law.” And in a lawsuit against TransUnion, again in 2022, over deceptive sales tactics, Chopra took the rare step of targeting not just the credit reporting agency, but also one of its senior managers.
That aggressive approach has made Chopra a hero to consumer interests and a scourge to the banks and other lenders his agency oversees.
“Wall Street can always attack the CFPB, but their opposition has reached, shall we say, insane levels with Rohit Chopra at the helm,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who heads the Senate Banking Committee.
Now the future of the agency that Chopra has wielded as a cudgel to change the behavior of the financial industry is under threat — and with it some of Chopra’s biggest victories.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could upend the agency and the market it regulates. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled last year that the agency’s funding structure, which uses direct transfers from the Federal Reserve, is unconstitutional. It concluded that all actions taken by the agency in its twelve years of existence should be “reversed.”
If the Supreme Court agrees that the agency’s funding is inappropriate, it could at least force the agency to rely on appropriations from Congress. Or the court could follow the 5th Circuit’s suggestion and strike down everything the agency has done to date.
Chopra — who at 41 is one of Washington’s youngest regulatory overseers — claimed to be optimistic about the attack on his agency’s power. “I think this is what you should expect when you do your job,” he said.
His opponents are destructive. In an op-ed essay, Rob Nichols, CEO of the American Bankers Association, criticized the agency’s “politicized enforcement binge,” calling it “a regulator gone rogue.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business lobbying group, launched a six-figure online ad campaign to denounce Chopra’s “radical agenda and reckless actions.”
In a speech last year at the Exchequer Club, a Washington-based group focused on economics and finance, Richard Hunt, a former CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association, said he suspected Chopra “hates banks.”
“He has preconceived opinions about banks, and that’s just not healthy,” Hunt said.
Chopra claimed he harbored no such prejudices. “I like to be quite direct,” he says. “The CFPB does not group companies into good and bad companies. We look at law-abiding versus disobedient, and look for a market that is what the law says: fair, transparent, competitive.”
He is uniquely motivated to act quickly, both personally and professionally. An ongoing battle with cancer reminds him of two things every day: the dedication of his work and the urgency to see it through to a successful conclusion.
Chopra was born in New Jersey and raised by first-generation immigrants from India in a suburb just across the border from Philadelphia. His mother, a physician, teaches geriatric medicine, and his father had various jobs in engineering and construction.
He graduated from Harvard University before attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2009, while completing his MBA degree, he studied the housing crisis as it unfolded and was fascinated by the professors who accurately predicted the dynamics of the crisis. That experience shattered for him any belief that the country’s regulatory standards were worth maintaining.
“The fact that there were so many warning signs that went unheeded — it’s still, I can’t, I still can’t fully understand that,” Chopra said. “There is no doubt that the way financial companies have been supervised for a long time has been a failure.”
The consumer agency was created through the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law enacted in response to the 2007 financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. When Elizabeth Warren—who had just succeeded in her quest to convince Congress that Washington needed a new financial regulator—began recruiting for the fledgling consumer agency, Chopra sent his resume.
Warren eagerly hired him in 2010. They had crossed paths before at Harvard; Chopra was one of the few students who registered on the famed law professor’s radar.
“The president of Harvard pointed him out to me,” Warren recalled. “We talked about students who know early on what battle they want to fight. She told me about Rohit, and I met him and I was just knocked down.
Colleagues from those early days – including some who later became close allies – remember Chopra as intense and sometimes unpleasantly brash.
“I thought he was a careerist, a fast-talking and heavy-handed person who I wouldn’t like,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer who worked at the firm for a year. “I quickly realized that the first impression was completely wrong: he cares deeply about this work.”
The consumer agency initially focused on creating new guardrails for the mortgage industry that had just imploded. Chopra was drawn to another area: student loans. It was a market that few in Washington paid any attention to, even as borrower debt levels skyrocketed.
The Dodd-Frank Act required the consumer agency to appoint an ombudsman to handle borrowers’ complaints about their student loans. Chopra was the obvious choice for the job, said Wally Adeyemo, who was the consumer bureau’s first chief of staff and now serves as deputy treasury secretary.
He was “completely out of central casting – he was both a very smart young man who cared deeply about these issues, and he could articulate why not only protecting individual students made sense, but also why this made sense for the economy,” said Adeyemo.
Once he got into the job, Chopra made a signature move: He ignored the legal boundaries of the position and changed the role to a much broader role. The law Congress wrote tasked the agency’s ombudsman with overseeing private education loans — a roughly 10% slice of a market dominated by federal loans. Chopra focused instead on those government-backed loans, and he quickly became a thorn in the side of the Department of Education, which he liked to describe as “a K-12 policy shop with a bank of one billion.” trillion dollars tied to it.”
Chopra pushed the department to step up enforcement against powerful groups that had long taken advantage of lax federal oversight and publicly shamed them.
A crackdown he helped instigate toppled the Corinthian Colleges and the ITT Technical Institute, two giants in the for-profit education world accused of illegal recruitment tactics. A series of damning regulatory reports on student loan deficiencies — combined with a still-active lawsuit the consumer agency filed against Navient, then one of the largest federal servicers — led to legislative changes and stricter oversight that have undermined some of the worst problems. abuse.
Industry leaders were outraged at being chased by an overseer with tusks. Shortly before ITT went bankrupt, the CEO sent an email to his corporate lawyers describing Chopra as an “economic terrorist” who “should be sent to Guantánamo Bay for about a decade of R&R; which should include an aggressive regime of ‘water sports’!”
“Part of me wishes Rohit could run virtually any federal agency,” said David Halperin, a Washington lawyer and longtime advocate of higher education financing reform. “Wherever he goes, he has not hesitated to utilize the full extent of the powers available to him, and actually use them, which is rare.”
Chopra left the consumer agency in 2015 for a brief stint at the Department of Education and then joined Hillary Clinton’s transition team in anticipation of a role in her administration. But the election of Donald Trump as president put an end to these plans – and within days, Chopra’s personal life collapsed as well.
During a doctor’s visit, his doctor discovered what she suspected was a cyst. Overwhelmed with planning for Clinton’s presidency, Chopra scheduled an ultrasound for the day after Election Day, thinking he would be running to work. Instead, he found himself in an unexpected career wilderness, finding himself unemployed for the first time in his adult life and diagnosed with late-stage thyroid cancer.
“People can really get hit with a bunch of bricks at the same time,” he said. Major surgery and radiation followed. Chopra rarely speaks about his health problems, but they remain a part of his life.
“You’re still working through it,” he said. “I mean, I’m not in remission. But you just keep going. I will be ok.”
Late last year, the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a ruling that ripped through Washington like a bolt of lightning.
Trade groups representing payday lenders had challenged an agency rule that would have restricted some of their activities, such as repeatedly trying to withdraw money from borrowers’ empty bank accounts. They threw out a litany of objections in their brief, including an argument that the consumer agency’s funding structure was unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit agreed, ruling that the payday rule was therefore invalid and should be overturned.
By attacking a weak rule that affected a large but limited industry, the lenders had found a court willing to strike at the foundations of every regulatory and enforcement action the agency had ever imposed. Many legal scholars were baffled. The decision is “playing with matches,” said Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Since the 5th Circuit’s ruling, more than a dozen companies, including MoneyGram, have sought to have lawsuits or penalties against them dismissed. The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week on the consumer agency’s appeal of the 5th Circuit’s ruling.
