Roger Yu

USA TODAY

Debt collectors who refuse to identify themselves. Banks that aggressively upsell unwanted credit cards. Mortgage brokers who disregard borrowers' ability to repay loans. Financial advisers who pitch high-fee annuities.

These are some of the financial industry players who have been in the crosshairs of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the law that enacted the bureau's enforcement powers, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

President Trump, who has high-profile Wall Street bankers working as his top aides, has been clear about his intent to roll back Dodd-Frank's regulatory reach and the CFPB's independence. Put in place during the Obama administration after the financial crisis of 2008, Dodd-Frank and the CFPB established a wide range of rules and oversight designed to curb financial companies' aggressive and risky practices that are harmful to consumers.

Friday, Trump stepped up his efforts, signing executive orders that direct Treasury officials to review oversight of "too big to fail" financial institutions.

Specifically, Trump called on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to review the use of the so-called orderly liquidation authority, as granted by Dodd-Frank. It lays out a process to quickly liquidate large, insolvent banks and financial companies. Trump wants to review whether court-supervised bankruptcy may be a better way to wind them down. Some argue that bankruptcy procedures focus too narrowly on creditors’ claims and don’t have the tools to assess the broader effects of the failure on the financial system.

Trump wants to review how the Financial Stability Oversight Council, established by Dodd-Frank, designates non-bank financial institutions, such as insurance companies, as "systemically important" to the financial system. Those companies are then subject to additional oversight by the Federal Reserve.

In January, Trump signed executive orders that called for reviewing and possibly eliminating Dodd-Frank provisions. He halted the so-called fiduciary rule, which had been due to go into effect April 10 and would require financial advisers who work with retirement plans to act in the best interest of their clients. In March, the Labor Department proposed to delay the implementation until June.

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Critics of Dodd-Frank argue that it is too broad in scope, contains too many cumbersome rules that hinder new loans and business and costs banks too much money in compliance efforts. Some executives and lawmakers complain that Dodd-Frank provisions are often applied without regard to the missions and market segmentation of different sub-sectors in the financial industry. For example, credit unions' practices differ greatly from investment banks, and rules should be more tailored, critics say.

The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, estimates Dodd-Frank has cost the financial industry more than $24 billion in compliance-related expenses.

As for the fiduciary rule, companies are concerned that it would cost them millions in commissions and would be costly to implement, so much so that some smaller and independent financial advisers might not be able to afford the cost of keeping up with the new regulations.

According to consulting firm AT Kearney, the fiduciary rule will result in roughly $20 billion of lost revenue for the financial industry by 2020.

It would take 60 Senate votes and a major legislative push to kill Dodd-Frank, and few in Washington say that’s likely. The president, backed by the financial services industry and Republican lawmakers, is likely to chip away many rules by using a variety of tactics, such as denying funds to enforcement agencies, appointing industry-friendly regulators or simply easing back on enforcement.

Enforcement could be diminished, depending on what happens to the leadership of the CFPB, which is independently funded by the Federal Reserve. Trump wants to appoint his own head of the agency, even though the term of CFPB Director Richard Cordray doesn’t expire until 2018. Republicans have proposed replacing the agency's director with a five-member bipartisan committee.

When Cordray was asked by a CNBC reporter whether he planned to step down, Cordray didn't answer directly but said he believes "the independence of a consumer watchdog is very much worth fighting for."

The CFPB has aggressively cracked down on fraudulent and misleading financial products since its creation under Dodd-Frank in 2010. The agency says it collected $11.7 billion in relief for more than 27 million harmed consumers since its creation and handled nearly 1 million consumer complaints.

The CFPB “is the most effective consumer protection agency in the history of the United States. By far,” says Dennis Kelleher, CEO of non-profit advocacy group Better Markets. The CFPB levied a $100 million fine on Wells Fargo Bank for its illegal practice of secretly opening unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts. Other financial institutions that had to pay CFPB fines include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Equifax, TransUnion and Moneytree. “One way to substantially reduce consumer protection, even if you don’t have the votes to abolish the agency, is to starve it of its funds. And I’m afraid that’s what they may be in the process of doing,” Barney Frank, a former Massachusetts congressman and partial namesake of the law told USA TODAY. “If you don’t keep the rules we have in place to restrain irresponsible risk-taking, you’ll have, at some point, another crash.”

Also probably quashed would be dozens of pending CFPB rules aimed at curbing financial industry abuses. One prominent rule pending is aimed at the payday lending industry, which charges consumers interest rates as high as 300% for emergency loans. The rule would require lenders to take steps to make sure consumers have the ability to repay their loans. “These are things that hit people directly in their pocketbook,” says Michael Barr, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a key architect of Dodd-Frank when he worked as the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for financial institutions.

Dodd-Frank was created in response to the financial crisis, largely triggered by the housing market meltdown and bets taken by big banks such as Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns on risky mortgages. But most of its major provisions also apply to smaller financial institutions, a point of discontent for credit unions and community banks.

Smaller banks, in particular, want to see "qualified mortgage" rules tossed out. The rules limit how banks lend by requiring that they make a good-faith effort to determine that borrowers have enough income to repay their loans. As part of the process, banks have to review borrowers' income, assets, employment, credit history and monthly expenses to comply with the rules and provide "qualified" mortgages.

Under the qualified mortgage rules, banks are largely banned from offering certain "harmful loan features," such as an “interest-only” period, loan principals that increase over time, balloon payments that come due at the end of a loan term and loan terms longer than 30 years. Such loans are safer for the financial industry and perform better for banks, says Sarah Wolff, senior researcher at Center for Responsible Lending.

"Loans that meet (the rules' criteria) have benefits for homeowners since they can have reasonable loans they can pay," she says. "It has benefits for the lender because they don’t have to deal with a lot of defaults. If we have loans that are affordable, it provides stability for the entire system."

Banks, particularly small and community-based lenders, say the rules have hurt business and forced community banks to consolidate. A Harvard University study in 2015 indicates that community banks’ influence in the loan market has fallen over the years. Community banks’ share of U.S. banking assets and lending markets declined from more than 40% in 1994 to about 20%,the study says.

Kelleher of Better Financial Markets doesn't buy the argument that these rules stalled the mortgage market. “Mortgage activity is at the 2008 peak level again. Facts show that the rules don’t inhibit borrowing at all,” he says.

The nation's largest bank holding companies — ones with total assets of $50 billion or more — must maintain certain capital levels and maintain credit quality and are periodically checked by regulators to ensure compliance. The "stress tests" — conducted by bank management and separately by the Federal Reserve to determine whether the companies have enough capital to withstand a crisis — were put into place because regulators were afraid banks might lose their ability to provide loans to households and businesses during a severe recession.

The tests were deemed necessary after the financial crisis that sank the value of banks' financial assets and left many of them fighting for survival. The federal government spent about $700 billion in a program to buy distressed assets and provide liquidity to banks, as well as other spending initiatives to lend or guarantee loans. For example, insurer American International Group (AIG), which was an aggressive seller of "credit default" swaps," received $182.3 billion of taxpayer bailout funds from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The swaps insured the assets that supported corporate debt and mortgages.

Dodd-Frank requires banks with $50 billion or more in assets to submit “a living will” to federal regulators. The plan must describe the company's strategy for “rapid and orderly resolution in the event of material financial distress or failure of the company.”

Banks have lobbied for the $50 billion threshold to be raised to $200 billion or more, which would allow more banks to avoid the stress test and other requirements.

“If you don’t regulate firms, you’re not going to have capital, and they’re going to do risky things,” says Barr of the University of Michigan. “Firms hate (the stress tests).” If any of the large banks were to fail, “taxpayers are ultimately going to be on the hook.”

The fiduciary rule would require financial advisers who work with retirement plans to meet the professional standards of “a fiduciary,” meaning they would have to act in the best interests of their clients by clearly stating fees and commissions and any potential conflict of interest.

Fiduciary rule proponents say some firms set up incentives for their financial advisers to steer clients into products that have higher fees and lower returns. These conflicts of interest in retirement advice cost American families about $17 billion a year, according to the Department of Labor.

The financial advisory industry has fought aggressively against the rules, saying it prohibits companies from offering a wider array of products.

“If an adviser has two identical products — one pays a 5% commission and another pays 1% — the (rule) lets advisers (recommend) consumers to take the 5% commission product. It’s going to cost Americans tens of billions a year,” Kelleher says. “It’s going be in the pockets and bonuses of financial advisers.”

Follow USA TODAY reporter Roger Yu on Twitter @ByRogerYu.