美国国家公共电台 NPR White House Takes Aim At Financial Protections For Military

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Next we have an exclusive story. The Trump¹ administration is taking aim at a law designed to protect military service members from getting cheated by shady lending practices. NPR has obtained documents that show the White House is proposing changes that critics say would leave service members vulnerable to getting ripped off when they buy cars. NPR's Chris Arnold has the story.

CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE²: The Military Lending Act is supposed to protect service members from predatory loans and financial products. Christopher Peterson is a law professor at the University of Utah. He helped to write the regulations for the Defense³ Department. And we showed him these internal documents, the proposal to change the rules for auto⁴ dealers⁶.

CHRISTOPHER PETERSON: If the White House does this, it'll be manipulating the Military Lending Act regulations at the behest of auto dealers and banks to try and make it easier to sell overpriced rip-off products to military service members.

ARNOLD: OK. Here's how this works. When you drive a new car off the lot, it loses some value right away. And car dealers will point this out and tell you, hey, if you crash and total your car, you could be out a pile of money. That's because your insurance might not pay you as much as you owe on your car loan. The odds⁷ are you're not going to total your car, but...

PETERSON: Car dealers push it so much and they scare people so to convince people they've got to have this gap insurance.

ARNOLD: That is insurance to cover the gap between what you owe on your car loan and the value of your car that's covered by your main insurance policy. The thing is, you can get this kind of insurance for very little money. Peterson says it's often just $20 or $30 a year from your regular car insurance company.

PETERSON: But if you buy it from your car dealer⁵, they may mark it up for 500, 600, 700. I've seen gap insurance policies being sold for $1,500.

ARNOLD: That's over the course of the loan. Now, the rules to protect service members effectively block auto dealers from tacking⁸ on an extra product like overpriced gap insurance and then rolling it into the car loan, but the industry has been lobbying to change that. And the White House appears to be sympathetic. It just sent the latest version of a proposal to the Defense Department, and documents show it would give the car dealers what they want. Paul Metrey is with the National Automobile⁹ Dealers Association.

PAUL METREY: Service members certainly should have the same access to credit protection that their civilian¹⁰ counterparts have. And now when they engage in these transactions, this valuable gap product is effectively not available to them.

ARNOLD: The thing is, though, that active-duty military personnel are not civilians¹¹, and they get some special protections under the law. And Peterson says that service members can still get this kind of insurance, and often more cheaply, elsewhere.

PETERSON: If somebody really wants to have some gap insurance to protect them from this situation, they should just go to their insurance company and buy it.

ARNOLD: Meanwhile, there's another change afoot that critics say would weaken the enforcement of the Military Lending Act more broadly. This involves Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration's acting¹² director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under Mulvaney, the bureau is planning to halt regular monitoring of payday lenders and other firms to see whether they're violating the act and cheating people in the military. Retired¹³ Army Colonel Paul Kantwill doesn't like the sound of that. He recently left his position at the consumer protection bureau, where he worked on issues facing service members.

PAUL KANTWILL: I am troubled by this. I am very concerned about it.

ARNOLD: The bureau says it will still investigate complaints of abuses, but Kantwill says that the bureau's stopping its efforts to actively¹⁴ monitor whether lenders are violating the Military Lending Act.

KANTWILL: This would be like removing the sentries¹⁵ from the guard posts guarding your military installation or your compound.

ARNOLD: And Kantwill says the troops need protection. Before this law was in place, he says a lot of service members got stuck in damaging, high-cost loans.

KANTWILL: For years and years, since I was a lieutenant¹⁶ in the Army JAG Corps¹⁷ in 1990, we saw the payday lenders and the vehicle title loan places. I think there were 21 of them right outside of the main gate of Fort Campbell, Ky., And the Military Lending Act and the regulations that implement¹⁸ it have gone a long way toward eliminating a lot of those practices.

ARNOLD: Kantwill says when people in the military get mired¹⁹ in debt and high-cost loans, that creates problems in terms of military readiness. They can lose security clearances²⁰ or just get distracted by financial trouble at home.

KANTWILL: And it can get even more serious than that. Service members are kicked out of the service for reasons that involve their inability to handle their financial affairs.

ARNOLD: All of that is why Congress passed these special protections. So why would the consumer protection bureau pull back on enforcement this way? Well, documents show that under Mulvaney, the bureau is now claiming that it may not have the legal authority to actively go out looking for violations²¹ of the act. Colonel Kantwill disagrees.

KANTWILL: There is broad, specific authority for the bureau to be able to examine for these sorts of issues.

ARNOLD: As far as the changes requested by the auto dealers, allowing them to roll products like extra insurance into car loans, the Defense Department says the issue is still in the proposal stage and that any changes will, quote, "be made only if necessary and in a way that does not reduce the protections afforded to service members and their families." Chris Arnold, NPR News.