The most obvious case is the CFPB, which returns roughly twice its cost to taxpayers. I would argue that's honestly very inefficient, I'd like to see the CFPB returning a multiple of its cost to taxpayers... but nonetheless it is obvious shutting it down will cost taxpayers more.
We only see what it's directly returning to customers, not the damage it prevents to happen in the first place by a) forcing companies to change their behaviour and b) possibly influencing legislation and policy making.
Your point is spot on, but I think it actually does have better returns for consumers on paper than that. IIRC, it saves consumers 10s of billions for < 1 billion of expenses.
The CFPB claims to have recovered $19 billion for consumers, total, since 2011. Which is 14 years ago. So maybe it recovers 1.4 billion a year.
It's budget is around 600 million a year. So yeah, it probably recovers a little over double what it costs to operate.
That sounds okay, but bear in mind the recovered funds are... taxpayer dollars that we unfairly paid. And when you factor in the cost in taxes we pay for CFPB, that means... we're only getting a little more than half our money back. That's certainly better than not getting anything back, but I'd hesitate to call it "efficient".
The challenge is that this doesn’t take into account harm prevented. How many companies changed their policies as a result of CFPB enforcement / to avoid CFPB involvement?
Based on the hijinks we have still been seeing day to day, I am not sure I think the CFPB has been scaring companies into good behavior on any significant scale. I am sure there's some, but I think the penalties are clearly too low if half of the recovery amount is operational costs for the CFPB itself.
Anecdotally, I work for a very large tech company and the CFPB is mentioned frequently as an important regulator. It has (had) an outsized impact where it regulated and definitely caused companies to change their behavior or at least be more continuous.
> based on murders we have still been seeing day to day, I’m not sure prosecutors have been scaring criminals into good behavior on any significant scale.
If the benchmark is perfection, no one can meet that standard. On top of the 20B in recovered consumer relief, they’ve levied another 5B in fines. It’s also important to look at their progress [1] where they’ve taken > 350 enforcement actions since they started. They were on track to be quite successful at enforcement actions until Trump’s first term when he started trying to cripple them. Same with penalty relief btw. Most of the dollars returned were under Democratic presidents.
No agency within the government can do well when the administration is purposefully trying to cripple you in the first place.
