The Early Warnings Service declared the case “meritless” despite the $870 million figure and said the CFPB’s lawsuit “simultaneously creates and enforces entirely new legal requirements” for how financial institutions respond to fraud claims.

This point has been echoed by industry groups. In a statement to Yahoo Finance, Lindsey Johnson, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, accused the CFPB of trying to use its enforcement powers to create effective last-minute new regulations, relying on “smart wording and salacious headlines.” .

But progressive groups argue that the Zelle lawsuit demonstrated the value of the CFPB at a time when Trump advisers like billionaire Elon Musk have been talking about abolishing it.

“We are quietly living in a golden age of financial fraud,” said Mark Hays, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “Cases like these show that it is really important to have at least one regulator in Washington whose job it is to protect individual consumers.”

Firing shots at companies – and the next government

With its lawsuit against Walmart, the CFPB is firing another last-minute salvo against a corporate giant. It is alleged the retailer required gig workers who participated in its Spark Drivers program, which handles last-mile deliveries, to agree to be paid through accounts managed by Branch Messenger. The lawsuit alleges the companies opened accounts without permission using information they collected, such as Social Security numbers.

According to the lawsuit, Walmart and Branch lied about how quickly workers could access their money through the accounts, which lacked basic features like writing checks and charged fees for quickly transferring funds. The CFPB alleges that as a result, the branch “collected more than $10 million in junk fees” and that hundreds of thousands of dollars were deposited into accounts that employees could never access.

In a statement, Walmart called the case “rife with factual errors” and said the CFPB “never gave it a fair opportunity to state its case during its rushed investigation.”

The Rocket Homes case may be less politically charged; She accuses the company of engaging in a “comparison shopping kickback scheme,” as Chopra put it, by providing referrals to real estate agents when they encouraged buyers to use Rocket Mortgage. The company also reportedly required brokers to “preserve and protect” relationships with their customers by discouraging them from other mortgage options. (Rocket Homes called the lawsuit “flimsy” in a statement, noting that a large portion of its customers chose other lenders.)

While few expect the Trump administration to succeed in shutting down the agency, it is widely expected that the Trump administration will take a more hands-off approach to enforcement at the CFPB compared to the Biden administration. Trump’s first CFPB director, Mick Mulvaney, slowed new cases to a minimum while some and other enforcement efforts were launched against payday lenders under his Obama-appointed predecessor, Richard Cordray. Kraninger took a slightly different approach, but often sought relatively light sentences.

Kraninger told Yahoo Finance that while Trump’s next nominee could certainly dismiss some of Chopra’s cases, it may not happen immediately.

“For anyone who cares about the law, you don’t want to willingly withdraw cases, and you don’t want to willingly withdraw cases,” she said. “So it takes time to review the cases and there is a public statement.”

Still, conservative groups are already pushing for Trump to roll back the CFPB’s latest efforts.

“I can’t address the merits of every lawsuit, they’re filing them so quickly,” said John Berlau, director of financial policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “(But) when the Trump administration is in office, it should root out and review bad regulations from day one, of which there are many, but also the baseless and harmful enforcement actions that the previous administration pursued.”

Jordan Weissmann is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance.