A year after the founding of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, a public-private partnership was launched with the aim of providing money and technical assistance to local governments to “develop, launch, and replicate and test financial empowerment strategies.”
Now that the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has started dismantling the CFPB, the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund’s work in 145 cities and counties nationwide is emerging as an even more significant source of consumer protection and financial services, and through a level of government more accountable — and closer — to voters: municipalities. For low-income Americans, local governments may well become the last source of accessible, public financial support.
The CFE Fund builds on an experiment in New York City that began in 2008 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That year, the city piloted Financial Empowerment Centers to provide professional financial planning services to low-income residents, including debt erasure, identifying and applying for benefits like child care and earned income tax credits, and learning how to create a personal budget. In 2013, Bloomberg Philanthropies and what was then called the Living Cities’ Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund announced $16.2 million in grants to create similar programs in five more cities. Fast forward to now, and the CFE Fund has granted more than $69 million to city governments and their partners. Sixty-two million people live in CFE Fund partner cities, and 900,000 residents have received direct support from CFE Fund-supported programs.
The scope of CFE Fund-supported work has also grown. In addition to financial literacy and counseling, the grantmaker started supporting the formation of local, government-run consumer protection offices in 2017; so far, according to the organization’s website, 14 cities have started providing consumer protection services. In Detroit, for example, CFE-supported work helped the city identify predatory land contracts and alternative mortgage fraud as key issues; in response, the city created a comprehensive awareness plan and guide for homebuyers and nonprofit housing services. And in Philadelphia, it led to the creation of a mayoral taskforce on consumer financial protection, eventually leading to a new ordinance targeting businesses that deceive city residents.
Other CFE Fund-supported projects include an Emergency Financial Empowerment initiative to ensure that financial services are integrated into municipal disaster responses and Bank On, a national initiative in 60 cities across the country to serve unbanked and underbanked individuals and families — an important program given the 23% of low-income Americans who didn’t have a bank account in 2023.
In addition to funding from a number of financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Discover Bank, roughly 50% of the organization’s money comes from private philanthropy, CFE Fund Senior Communications and Development Director Katie Plat said. The fund’s past private backers include the W.K. Kellogg, Skillman and Annie E. Casey Foundations. A Bloomberg Philanthropies spokesperson said that it has supported the CFE Fund since 2012.
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The Principal Foundation, the corporate foundation of financial services company Principal Financial Group, has supported the fund since 2021 with two multi-year grants totaling $3 million. Jo Christine Miles, the director of Principal Financial Group Foundation and Principal Community Relations, told Inside Philanthropy her organization backs the fund because “more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, which means cities sit at the center of most social issues — including financial security and inclusion — and have the potential to effect the most change and have the most impact on these issues.”
CFE Fund President and CEO Jonathan Mintz shares that sentiment. “Our unofficial mission is that financial empowerment programs and policies should be a standard tool in a mayor’s tool belt of public services,” he said. “It should be part of the primary array of how local government serves its citizenry.” Prior to becoming the organization’s founding leader, Mintz served as the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs under Bloomberg and was instrumental in establishing both New York’s Office of Financial Empowerment and the Financial Empowerment Center initiative.
Mintz shared several reasons he believes that municipalities are well positioned to support their low-income residents’ financial services needs. One is city governments’ ability to integrate financial services with other city functions — for example, weaving financial counseling into domestic violence support or workforce re-entry programs for formerly incarcerated people.
Another unique ability that city government brings to the financial services table is “literal enforcement power,” Mintz said. Examples include Denver’s 2023 passage of a wage theft ordinance and Albuquerque and New Mexico’s ordinance requiring tax preparers to disclose how much they will charge for their services in advance, which was also approved in 2023. Plat told Inside Philanthropy that the ordinances were the result of the fund’s work in those cities.
And, unlike Congress and large financial institutions, local governments are uniquely accountable to their constituents. “We hear again and again from mayors that people see them in the grocery store, they stop them in the street,” Mintz said. That accountability inspires greater trust. “The ability to say, ‘This is a free public service, you can trust us,’” felt like a little bit of a leap when the fund was starting out, Mintz said. But “the truth is that when people are being preyed upon in the financial services sector, they do trust government.”
Mintz stressed that the CFE Fund’s work is meant to add value to the provision of local financial services, not to compete with nonprofits that, when the fund was starting out, had already “been laboring in the fields” of the financial literacy work that was the grantmaker’s starting point. “The last thing we wanted to do was come in and say, ‘OK, now here’s the Bloomberg way to do it,’” he said. “Instead, we really asked ourselves and bound ourselves to the idea of, ‘where was a unique value-add?’” that local governments could provide to the field.
But while CFE Fund isn’t looking to compete with nonprofits, it also rarely makes grants to them directly. Instead, the majority of its grantmaking goes directly to municipalities which are then free to contract with nonprofits to get the work done. Mintz said that his message to nonprofits that approach his organization for support is “great, bring your mayor to the table and let’s work on this together.”
The local work that the CFE Fund supports won’t be a sufficient answer to a federal administration that’s hostile to its citizens in their roles as workers and consumers. But as we move forward into the next weeks, months and years, state and local programs like the ones the fund supports may well become the last place that low-income Americans can rely on to protect their financial futures.
