Since President Donald Trump has gutted much of the federal government’s consumer protection work, state attorneys general are increasingly left to fight high prices and investigate businesses themselves.

Consumer protection work, long a growing focus of state AGs from both parties, has ramped up considerably more in the past two years, legal experts say. The change follows Trump’s dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created by Congress in the wake of the Great Recession. And persisting concerns about the high prices of housing, groceries and fuel has made affordability a top political concern for many AGs.

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After Trump took office last year, the bureau became an early target of billionaire Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. Since then, it has dropped dozens of investigations and enforcement cases, moved to slash the agency workforce and made it harder for consumers to submit complaints.

Consumers across the region have felt the squeeze from soaring gas prices and electricity rate increases, making affordability a pressing issue for state leaders.

The Trump administration also has sought to limit the authority granted to states to enforce financial services protections under the federal legislation that launched the CFPB.

Now, Republican and Democratic attorneys general are increasingly teaming up to use state laws and enforce federal laws to go after alleged antitrust violations, deceptive marketing practices and price gouging, as many Americans grow weary of high prices.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, president of the bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General, said states are increasingly working to fill the void left by the federal government.

“We do a ton of work in trying to pick up the pieces,” said Tong, a Democrat.

Last year, Tong launched a national affordability campaign aimed at using state laws to drive down consumer costs. While sometimes prices go up simply because of general inflation, he said, states have the power to tackle affordability by targeting unfair and deceptive business practices.

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“It’s probably less complicated than people think,” he said. “If it looks unfair, if it seems unfair, it probably is unfair.”

Experts note that state AGs cannot fully replace the breadth of work once undertaken by the federal government. And the growing interest in large, multistate cases can divert attorneys general office resources from other pressing local consumer matters, they add.

Still, big businesses have taken note of the changing landscape: Once considered secondary enforcers of consumer protections, states are increasingly defining the rules around pricing transparency, subscription service fees and algorithmic pricing. That decentralization means businesses can face quickly evolving, different or even contradictory rules in different states.

“It means enforcement is moving closer to home,” said Ashley Taylor, a partner at law firm Troutman Pepper Locke. His work includes helping clients with compliance issues, government investigations and enforcement efforts brought by state AGs. Though states are working less with the federal government, he said, companies haven’t seen a drop in regulation — instead, they face the prospect of highly coordinated state investigations and lawsuits.

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Democratic and Republican attorneys general have hired former CFPB employees, expanded their consumer protection staff and budgets for outside counsel,and increasingly specialize in different areas of business law. Indiana and Illinois, for example, have built a reputation for investigating data breaches and privacy issues, Taylor said.

The consumer work of AGs stands in stark contrast to their splashy partisan work that often garners headlines. Republicans, for example, often sued Democratic President Joe Biden over environmental, labor and gun policies. And Democratic AGs have filed over 100 lawsuits against the Trump administration, challenging federal funding cuts, immigration enforcement efforts and tariffs on foreign goods.

“That’s a whole different world,” Taylor said. “If you’re in business, if you have a consumer protection concern, an antitrust concern, or privacy concern, it’s nonpartisan, completely nonpartisan.”

Bipartisan state enforcement

Tong said not having a federal partner makes it harder for his office to do all the work it wants, but he said he’s not ignoring any consumer complaints. “You probably don’t get to it as fast as you want or as completely as you want.”

As one example, he pointed to an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, which owns hundreds of concert venues, a promotion business and Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket-selling platform. The Biden administration started that investigation, but the Trump administration and six Republican-led states dropped the effort, with a surprise $280 million settlement reached in the first days of the trial.

Still, 33 states and Washington, D.C., continued with the trial, ultimately convincing a federal jury that Ticketmaster operated as a monopoly and harmed consumers. In the second phase of the trial, the court will now weigh financial penalties and potentially force the company to break apart.

“After the federal government abandoned us, Democrats and Republicans hung in there and we got a guilty verdict against Live Nation/Ticketmaster for illegally using their monopoly to rip us all off,” Tong said.

Following the April verdict, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach was among the Republicans celebrating the decision. A staunch Trump supporter, Kobach said he refused to accept the federal government’s “weak settlement.”

In a similar bipartisan effort, 46 states recently won a $45 million with Block Inc., the owner of peer-to-peer payment service CashApp. States alleged that the company illegally misled consumers about the safety of its app and failed to protect users from fraud, though the firm did not admit to wrongdoing in the settlement.

Tong said states pursued the case because of lax oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which under the Biden administration ordered the firm to pay $175 million for failing to protect users.

“States have a lot of authority. They’re doing what they can to fill the gaps, but the hole left by the gutting of the CFPB is impossible to entirely fill,” said Amanda Fischer, policy director and chief operating officer at Better Markets, a nonprofit consumer and investor watchdog group.

Since its inception, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped more than 200 million Americans recoup over $21 billion from financial services companies. That included restitution for improper junk fees, deceptive lending and the highly publicized banking scandal at Wells Fargo revolving around mortgages, auto loans and checking accounts.

Fischer said the agency has now undertaken a “reverse-Robin Hood campaign,” using its might to enrich financial and tech firms instead of consumers.

State AGs can’t fully focus on replacing CFPB’s actions, since they must also devote resources to criminal and civil state court cases and local business complaints. And Democratic AGs are devoting time and money to ongoing legal battles to keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau funded.

“So they have to spend resources to even have an operational bureau, let alone pick up the work that they’re not doing.”

The CFPB did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

Earlier this month, acting CFPB Director Russell Vought told a U.S. Senate committee that the agency had been “weaponized” under the past administration. He said overregulation had stifled innovation, reduced consumer choice and increased prices.

Focus on affordability

While states have worked on consumer issues for years, legal experts have noticed a heightened focus on affordability efforts from state AGs of both parties.

Republican attorneys general in Indiana and Georgia recently warned retailers against pocketing the savings from temporary suspensions of their state gas taxes.

Neither office responded to requests for comment. In May, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said complaints to his office resulted in 30 formal price gouging investigations as well as informal inquiries into price fluctuations at another 100 gas stations.

His office created an online dashboard tracking live gas prices across more than 4,600 Indiana gas stations.

“We know every penny matters right now and are committed to making sure you are treated fairly at the pump during this time,” Rokita said in an April news release.

In Texas, the Republican AG is cooperating with the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether meatpackers are driving up beef prices. And Washington state’s Democratic AG is suing a grocery chain over allegedly overcharging customers through deceptive Buy One Get One Free promotions.

Darwin Roberts, a lawyer at the Morgan Lewis firm and a previous deputy attorney general in Washington state, said many of those issues have long been in the wheelhouse of AG offices. They’re just being framed differently in the era of inflation.

“They’d be doing this work,” he said. “But the fact that it dovetails so closely with this issue that’s becoming really politically important causes them to emphasize it.”

Roberts said state laws banning deceptive or unfair trade practices are purposefully broad, allowing attorneys general to challenge evolving business practices or emerging markets.

For businesses, the changing regulatory landscape presents new challenges. Companies must navigate a landscape of varying individual state regulations or investigations, the possibility of lawsuits from coalitions of multiple states and potential federal enforcement.

“It can be a difficult environment for businesses,” Roberts said, “because they’re facing a range of regulators looking at them.”