Every year, millions of complaints flow to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from people across the country. The complaints, which range in focus from debt collection to credit reporting to payday loans and more, long served as a window into Americans’ gripes and struggles with various companies.

For over a decade, consumers could opt in to have what they wrote published as public information in a CFPB database. But last month, the Trump administration announced that it would stop publishing those complaint narratives, a decision that aligns the agency with corporations that have critiqued the system for years.

“Publishing such narratives in the Database provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences,” the CFPB said in a press release.

In the big picture, the move is part of a trend of the administration taking a friendlier approach with businesses — even at the federal agency tasked with guarding consumers from unfair and deceptive practices.

The complaint system helps consumers get responses from companies about their problems, and sometimes even fixes. It has also given the public — as well as federal investigators and regulators— access to information that serves as a warning or to help spot problems.

As a ProPublica data reporter, I’ve used the complaints time and time again as a tool for accountability-driven reporting. I appreciated reading about people’s raw frustration, written in their own words, which can often point to larger trends. It was a rare federal dataset that captured human emotions. Some were grievances like being unable to get help after spending far too much time calling or emailing customer service. Sometimes complaints had more urgency: desperation to fix crushing high-interest debt, a frozen bank account or a credit score tanked from a reporting error.

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