Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is stripping critical consumer experiences from public view.

On August 14, the CFPB announced that it would stop publishing the narratives people submit when asking the agency for help, as well as the visualizations that allow consumers, journalists, lawmakers, researchers, and watchdogs to identify patterns across millions of complaints.

More than 17 million reports have been submitted to the CFPB. These complaints can expose financial scams, abusive lending, discrimination, credit reporting failures, debt collection abuses, and other harmful corporate practices. When thousands of people report similar problems with the same company or product, the public deserves to know.

Removing complaint narratives from the public database makes those patterns harder to see. The scams do not disappear. The discrimination does not disappear. The corporate abuse does not disappear. It simply becomes harder for the public to expose it.

Federal law requires the CFPB to maintain a system for collecting, monitoring, and responding to consumer complaints. Federal open-data requirements also require agencies to provide public access to public information and data assets. The CFPB should comply with those obligations, not retreat from transparency to protect the reputations of powerful financial corporations.

Tell the CFPB: Keep consumer complaints public. Stop hiding corporate wrongdoing and follow federal open-data law.