California is about to give used-car buyers something almost no other state offers: a real, no-questions-required window to change their mind. Starting October 1, 2026, a buyer who drives home in a used vehicle priced at $50,000 or less gets three calendar days to bring it back to the dealer and cancel the deal. For…

Starting October 1, 2026, a California used-car dealer has to put a lot more of what it tells a shopper into writing. A new state law replaces a patchwork of loosely enforced sales practices with specific, written disclosure duties covering price, optional add-ons and the condition of a vehicle that gets returned. For a household…

Hospitals were required to start following a new, stricter set of federal price-posting rules on January 1 of this year. But the government didn’t start enforcing those specific new requirements right away. Enforcement of the updated rules didn’t begin until three months later, on April 1, and that gap was deliberate. A Rule Change Tracing…

Hospitals have been required to post their real prices online since 2021, and for years the rule had a reputation for being toothless. It isn’t. Under federal regulation, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services can fine a single noncompliant hospital more than $2 million over a full year of violations, and it publishes the…

Inside the same August 21, 2026 order that produced more than $170 million in bill credits for Rhode Island Energy customers, the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission also did something much smaller and far less noticed: it told the utility that ratepayers won’t be covering $440,766 of the legal costs it wanted to recover. It’s…

A federal rule that has been in force since 2011, and was tightened in 2013, requires banks and credit unions to automatically shield roughly two months of Social Security, Supplemental Security Income and several other federal benefit deposits the moment a garnishment order lands on an account. The shield is automatic: no court filing, no…

FedEx, UPS and DHL have each told customers they will pass along tariff refunds once the federal government pays the carriers back. Target just banked $994 million from that same refund pool and is not cutting checks to shoppers with it. Both are legal, and both trace back to the same February court ruling —…

Amazon has told the businesses that advertise on its site for more than a decade that they are bidding in fair “second price” auctions, where the winner never pays more than a penny above the next-highest offer. Federal and state regulators say that promise was largely fiction. In a complaint filed August 31, the Federal…

Verizon’s last legal option to avoid paying a $46.9 million federal fine over its handling of customer location data has run out, at least for now. The Supreme Court’s move keeps a multi-year enforcement fight over how carriers sold real-time location data to third parties fully resolved in the government’s favor, though the money in…

A government watchdog has now put an official number on an effort that consumer advocates have been warning about for months: the push to gut the federal agency that fields complaints about banks, debt collectors, and mortgage servicers on behalf of ordinary households. The Federal Reserve’s own Office of Inspector General reviewed the situation at…