Before Chuck Sebian-Lander joined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a web content manager, he knew about as much about the agency as “anybody who watched The Big Short and got really angry about it,” he said. Previously, he’d worked as a proofreader and then project manager for a federal contractor that served federal health agencies, and Sebian-Lander saw this work as tremendously important, if slightly removed from his day-to-day life—”they’re doing work studying diseases I’ve never heard of or they’re treating children’s cancer,” he said.
Once at the CFPB, however, Sebian-Lander immediately understood how that agency’s work intersected with his own life. He graduated with student debt, and he and his wife took out a mortgage to buy their home. In his work on the CFPB’s website, he maintained pages that shared educational information about auto loans, bank loans, credit cards, credit reports, and credit scores, and debt. “It’s all stuff that everybody has to deal with in a very existential way, even if you’re a perfectly healthy person,” he said.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Elizabeth Warren helped to create the CFPB to protect consumers from predatory financial practices. The Bureau investigates complaints about unjust financial products or services, and since its founding, the watchdog agency has delivered $19.7 billion in consumer relief and $5 billion in civil penalties. The Trump administration, through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has attempted to shut down the agency by firing nearly every employee at the Bureau. These terminations face ongoing court challenges.
Sebian-Lander joined the CFPB in late 2020, where he worked as a web content manager, published new pages and updated existing content on the Bureau’s website. He was first told to stop his work in February. Since then, he’s been placed on administrative leave, taken off administrative leave due to a court order, received a Reduction in Force notice, and received a court order demanding the RIF be undone. “The intentional is clearly to fire us all,” Sebian-Lander said. I spoke with Sebian-Lander about the increasingly exploitative nature of financial markets, the importance of making the Bureau’s services accessible to everyone, and the CFPB’s unseen impact on all of our lives.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I would love to know more about your path toward public service.
I ended up getting a job as a proofreader right out of college. I applied to a few different places. The place I happened to get a job at was a federal contractor. So they had clients throughout NIH, HHS, CDC.
Then the CFPB job: I had started applying to jobs pretty much right around when the pandemic kicked off. Because it’s a federal job, it took a while, but by the end of the summer, I had switched jobs.
What I really like about the team I work on in particular, and working on the website in general … it’s a nexus point. Because no matter what the Bureau does, some part of it comes through the website. Whether it’s enforcement actions or the text of our regulations or requests for comments on new rulemaking or just a blog post from some of our researchers. … That all comes through my team and through what I do.
I went from knowing the trillion acronyms of all the NIH institutes to knowing a lot of different acronyms for all of the mortgage and loan stuff and all of the various mechanics of finance. It’s really easy to realize once you start seeing this stuff, it’s so insanely complicated—of course it’s exploitative. Of course it’s going to hurt people if you don’t have really careful checks in place to A) force financial institutions to play somewhat fair, and then B) educational materials and ways of reaching out to the public and explaining to them what their rights are. One of the major functions of the Bureau is the consumer complaint portal, which is a mechanism for actual action, right? We respond to those complaints, but it’s also just an opportunity to learn. To come to a place in the government that can say: We want to hear the problems you’re having with your bank or with your loan provider, and we want to help you figure that out. You can’t call [the Department of the] Treasury and ask them a question like that. You can’t talk to your own bank and expect that they have your [back]. It’s like going to HR when you have a problem—fundamentally HR is going to be on management’s side instead of on your side.
We’ve had rules about things like overdraft fees. We’ve had rules about things like the kind of penalties and the ways that banks can write the rules for your credit card or for your bank account. You’re not going to know that the CFPB is the reason those are written that way. But you will appreciate it, even if it doesn’t come up explicitly, when you don’t get charged an insane interest on your bank account or on your credit card. … That’s what you want government to be doing: the infrastructure, making sure this stuff actually functions underneath your feet. And it is exactly the sort of thing that idiots think you can just strip out and it will be fine, because things are fine. But especially these tech bro guys, they rely on this stuff to function just as much as anybody else. Not just that the economy doesn’t fall on its ass, but there are systems in place so they don’t get sued completely into oblivion when they go way out of control. The checks and balances are meant to keep things sane for everybody. And it’s only when you are in a place where greed becomes its own motivator and its own justification that you decide that it’s not worth protecting yourself in that equation.
We had a huge blog post that we posted sometime last year … about video gaming spaces. [Y]ou wouldn’t expect, probably, the federal government to be as aware of, for example, how dangerous Roblox is for kids, or things like that, or even that you had a federal agency willing to say, hey, we noticed that’s a problem. Before we are getting into rulemaking or policy, there’s a level of ability to push back on that stuff that is incredibly valuable.
We want to raise awareness about it, because then if we do want to move forward with rulemaking stuff, we’ve set the groundwork and the precedent for the rationalization. There isn’t another space—imagine a privately owned consumer watchdog. What are they supposed to do about something like that? They don’t have any leverage, and especially they don’t have the soft leverage where you can affect things before you actually take the step of banning or enforcing. The Bureau does … a ton of legal enforcement, of suing banks and suing financial institutions of various types. That money all goes directly back to consumers, or at least the vast majority of it, goes back. They have the civil penalty fund, which is explicitly a fund that the money from those actions goes into that gets dispersed to the people who are victimized. So there is that direct action. But if you’re doing proper oversight, you can’t just be reactive, right? You don’t want to just be in a position to constantly tell people they did wrong. You want to have ways to stop them from doing the wrong.
The problem with Roblox—I also am not super-familiar with Roblox—but it’s like kids can buy things?
It’s a predatory financial model. You can make games through Roblox, and you get “paid”—in extremely heavy quotation marks—to do it. But you’re paid in their provincial currency, that they only pay out at a certain amount. And meanwhile you’re paying fees to have the privilege of making those. There’s a really good YouTube series from People Make Games, which is a video game journalist outfit. They did a whole series about it where they were talking about creators who are more influential [that] essentially create a pyramid scheme of getting other children to come make games as part of their thing. It’s psychotic.
It’s so easy to dismiss stuff like that. But it’s where the market can do the most damage with it being the least noticed—to children, to marginalized populations, to people who don’t have an easy time finding a lawyer, or who don’t already know how to use complaint channels to work their way up. Another big thing I’ve worked on a lot on the website is internationalization and translation work, supporting the teams that write the content. We’re the ones who’ve built the technical scaffolding. So if you go to a page that’s translated, you can easily find cross-translations and stuff. But … the most trafficked page on our site, for international communities, is the one about sending money abroad, which makes total sense.
We think of U.S. government agencies as existing solely to serve the U.S. But that’s obviously not the case, especially if you are a person who has family in another country, or who is a first-generation immigrant, or is a prospective immigrant, or wants to send money to the U.S. All those sorts of things still have to interface with our financial systems. Then you get into, what if you are a first-generation immigrant who doesn’t speak English and needs a car loan or a bank account?
We have, if not a federal regulation, then a moral obligation, to ensure that at least those key aspects of what we provide and what we can do are available to them. That if a person who speaks only Vietnamese needs to complain about something that happened to them with their bank, that they know who we are, and they can reach out through our complaint portal or other channels like that and find some help.
I would love if you could talk about your work—what you did in a day.
My job title is web content manager, so publishing onto the website at the CFPB. … My job was managing and overseeing that process and the systems in place to support it, which means, really, the content management system that we use.
What I do a lot of is, how can we make the back-end system work better to support the front-end content? For example, we did a whole thing a few months back about data visualization. Over the past few years, research reports or things like that [have been] published as webpages. We were trying to push people to publish web reports, rather than just PDF reports … because people don’t want to click on [PDFs].
This massive 175-footnote behemoth of a thing that I think in years past might have been considered just as a PDF. But if the Bureau published a PDF-only version of a report about video games, I think they might have gotten made fun of for how that isn’t reaching the audience that would ever actually want to read the report.
Government websites are supposed to be Section 508 accessible, which… basically mandates federal websites need to be accessible to people with disabilities. So that’s screen readers and any assistive technology you would use to run a website. And there’s a lot of standards, both federal and non-federal, about how you do that. We generally have tried to be really ahead of the curve in terms of making our site both mobile-responsive and accessible.
Those wins can feel very small, I think, if you look at them in the scope of like a whole website. Now you have footnotes that we already had, but now they’re done a different way. But the ripple effect is but now the next time we do that, it’s gonna take half as much time.
Can you tell me about your experience of being fired?
The real kickoff for all of this was early February, which was when DOGE literally came into CFPB offices … which I remember very specifically, because I got a phone call that I missed from Gavin Kliger, who’s one of the DOGE people. I’m glad I missed it, because that was part of them trying to get access to everything.
The only reason they would want to have grabbed that access at the end of the night on a Friday is so that they could blow everything up while no one was looking. I was a mess that night. By the end of that night, they had taken down the homepage of the website and made it a 404.
If I were laid off, that would be sad for its own personal reasons. But here they’re not laying some people off. They’re killing the Bureau. The plan is to make the Bureau non-functional, even if it exists in some name or form. And it’s become very important to me. All the things that the Bureau does have become very important to me in the years I’ve been here, as I’ve begun to understand them more and more. And that loss is, I think, what was hitting me even more. You cry a little. Get angry a little. Go for long walks. Try to get away from it.
A lot of my coworkers have worked at the Bureau for a decade-plus. I’m still one of the new people on the team. They survived the whole previous Trump administration. They dug in and they got the work done and they stuck around… It’s not just that you’re losing institutional knowledge and these talents and these skills. You’re like, destroying this whole culture, this whole organism of these people who have worked together so long that they can work together naturally. You’re just throwing [it] in the trash can without thinking about it. That’s what I was mourning more than anything else.
I’m pretty sure what they were trying to do and what their plan was to begin with, is, we fire everybody first, and then somebody tells us it was illegal later, but those people are already fired. That’s the plan, right? Burn it down. And what are you going to do, sue us about the burned-down building? That’s not going to rebuild it. Now… we assume they want to burn the building down. So we’re going to get everything out, and we’re going to save as many things as we can. It sucks to feel like you’re in trench warfare at your job that’s supposed to be about public service and just helping people with their day-to-day lives and their issues.
Outside of finding another dream job, I think most of us are in it and digging our heels and then saying, “You have you’re gonna have to yank us out of the ground and throw us away before we’re gonna leave.” I think that has proven more resilient as a strategy than I might have expected it to be.
What do you think the nation will lose if the CFPB is non-functional [or] goes away?
With things like NIH and RFK, it’s easy to trace a line to death and illness, right? It’s very easy to see, like, OK, if you stop supporting vaccines, or if you stop supporting research into illnesses, you’re going to hurt people. I think there’s exactly the same line with the CFPB. It’s just with all those financial services that we cover.
From my personal observation, capitalism as a concept, as a vehicle, has driven itself so far off the cliff in terms of its willingness to burn its own consumers for the sake of the short term, for the sake of an immediate perceived gain, that all of these systems are innately exploitative and dangerous. All of them. I guess everything’s a scam or a grift if it can be. Crypto, for sure, but every financial thing that could look like crypto wants to look like crypto too, in terms of the ability to do things like a pump-and-dump scheme and stuff. The thing that differentiates crypto is it’s less regulated than normal financial models and normal currencies. The Bureau represents a genuine effort by government— which is really the only one who can do this at proper scale—to curb that effort. To curb the not just excess, but the thinking of financial models as exploitative first and beneficial later.
It’s very easy to understand why we need something like auto loans or home loans, right? It’s easy to understand, well, people don’t have that much money on hand. So you create these mechanisms. … And the Bureau is one of the major ways at this point that the United States can stop those things from hurting people more than they help them. Like I said, every credit card you ever apply for, every loan you ever get, whether it’s student or home or auto, those things could very easily swallow you whole. And they do to people still. I’m not at all arguing that the Bureau prevents this stuff en masse, as it doesn’t. But it is an attempt to stem the tide at a more fundamental level than reacting and suing could ever do. Because once you’ve lost everything, you’ve lost everything.
If the government exists for any reason, it is to provide the sort of support that can’t just be individualized, right? Yes, you want small communities. You want people to help each other within those local communities. But there are things at scales that “just you” can’t do. That’s infrastructure. That’s massive reforms to systems that exist beyond local governments or local communities. And just as much as healthcare is an example of where, without those proper checks in place, you get increasingly increasingly exploitative systems put in place, financial markets are an even more direct way for that to happen.
It’s also letting people understand what their rights are. Because even before the Bureau, people had certain rights to restitution. They just might not know. Why would you ever be, as a normal citizen, so aware of the existing legislation or law or financial regulations that you would know to read your bank’s offer sheet and say, “oh, that is impermissible”? So the Bureau is meant to exist as a mechanism for people to not have to know that. To say “I feel like this was wrong” to us, and then we find out what was wrong about it, and we seek that restitution for those people in a way that doesn’t require you to hire a fancy lawyer, that doesn’t require you to bankrupt yourself trying to undo the financial harm that’s been done to you.
Government can be good for people. It can help people, and it should help people wherever it can. And the CFPB is maybe one of the purest examples of that that I can think of. This exists pretty much solely to—and that’s why it’s such a target for banks and billionaires—it exists solely to help people on the other side of that equation, the victims of those institutions. I don’t know what other kind of thing you’d want—I was going to say your tax dollars, but that’s another goddamn thing, is the Bureau isn’t even funded by tax dollars. We are funded through congressional appropriations, and we make more money for consumers than we cost to maintain. But anyway, I don’t know what else you would want your government doing, other than that kind of direct service.
If you have lost your job as a result of ongoing government cuts and are interested in speaking with me for this series, please contact me on Signal at simbler.88 or [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.