Barney Frank, one of the first openly gay members of Congress, dies
Barney Frank, a former Massachusetts congressman who was one of the first openly gay members of Congress, has died. He was 86 years old.
6 million foreclosures and 10% unemployment. Stock prices fell 50%, major banks went bankrupt, and lending conditions froze.
The 2008 financial crisis was brutal, but most experts believe it was largely avoidable. In response, Congress set out to prevent something of this scale from happening again. Former Massachusetts representative Barney Frank, who died on May 19, was one of the key leaders of these efforts.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (later known simply as “Dodd-Frank”) took more than a year to draft and was finally signed into law in July 2010. The law was intended to strengthen banks from having to seek government bailouts and protect consumers of financial products and services. To a lesser extent, the law also placed some guardrails around financial markets to protect investors.
What has Dodd-Frank done for consumers?
“What we saw in the 2008 crash, leading up to the passage of Dodd-Frank, was that people could be taken advantage of in financial services and products,” said Pamela Fouhey, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law who specializes in bankruptcy and consumer finance.
The primary way Dodd-Frank addressed this problem was by creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to fill gaps in the regulatory landscape.
“While some federal agencies had so-called light regulatory authority over things that could have a significant impact on people’s lives, none of them were designed to think about the financial products that people use on a daily basis and the possibility that those financial service providers may not have consumers’ best interests in mind,” Foohey told USA TODAY.
Fouhey believes the CFPB is designed to facilitate interaction between consumers and financial service providers, not to act as a disciplinarian. One of the most notable ways is through a complaint portal where consumers can file complaints, which authorities then forward to the target party for response.
As an example, the CFPB reports that in 2025, it “received more than 6.6 million complaints and sent more than 5.9 million to businesses for review and response. Of the complaints received against businesses, the Bureau transmitted 97% of complaints to businesses within one day. Businesses responded in a timely manner to more than 99% of complaints sent for review and response.”
Fuhey believes the CFPB has been successful, even though it has had to fight to stay open since its inception, especially under the current Trump administration, which has seen significant staff reductions and restrictions on operations.
The bureau has “made significant strides and strides in identifying overlooked practices in consumer finance that are not helping people succeed,” Fouhey said. These practices included predatory mortgage lending, junk fees, confusing terminology to describe financial products, payday loans, and more.
But the CFPB is hated by businesses, financial institutions and many Republican politicians.
President Trump told reporters in February 2025 that his administration was “trying to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse” and wanted to dismantle government agencies. The American Bankers Association also previously told USA TODAY that it appreciated “the efforts of the Trump administration’s regulators, including the CFPB, to correct some of the overreaches of the previous administration.”
What did Dodd-Frank do to banks?
Mr. Dodd-Frank also sought to address the problems that have brought some of the world’s largest banks to their knees as financial markets wrung out. One of the key mechanisms is to require them to hold more capital, which Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and CEO of watchdog group Better Markets, argues is an important step.
“Bank equity serves the same role as a down payment on a home,” Kelleher told USA TODAY. “When banks suffer losses, they should have enough capital to absorb their own losses instead of failing. That’s what happened in 2008, and that’s the reason for bank bailouts. But bailouts are really taxpayers providing capital to failing banks.”
Dodd-Frank policy has been less successful in this regard. In 2023, three mid-sized banks will go bankrupt. Kelleher says that’s one of the law’s major failings. That’s because it left the power to create and implement as many as 400 rules to various regulators.
“When they couldn’t defeat Dodd-Frank in Congress, the financial industry threw an army of lawyers and lobbyists into the regulatory arena to try to defeat what they couldn’t defeat in the legislative arena,” he said.
What was left behind was a much weaker law that faces further erosion as the Trump administration takes further steps toward deregulation. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, has been disdainful toward crypto companies and recently moved to allow publicly traded companies to report their financial results twice a year instead of four.
“The market is becoming significantly more deregulated,” Kelleher said. “They shut down law enforcement, so financial criminals have less information to provide to investors and are able to defraud investors more often.”
Foohey believes that many rollbacks are self-defeating. “The purpose of Dodd-Frank, and I don’t want to get sidetracked, is to help the economy and the people in it, so there’s going to be more money for everyone.”
