Senator Jeff Merkley comes from a family of fighters. According to family lore, his grandmother lived for a time in a boxcar during the Great Depression. Jeff’s mother stretched a dollar as far as anyone possibly could, and his father overcame a serious illness and went on to work in a lumber mill and become a union machinist. Life wasn’t glamorous, but together, Jeff’s parents saved enough to buy a modest home, take their children on annual camping vacations, and retire comfortably after a lifetime of contributing to their community.
Jeff is fighting to fix our broken financial system and make it work for middle-class families and small businesses again. Jeff is passionate about consumer protection and making sure that ordinary families are protected against scams and predatory schemes that threaten their pocketbooks. He led the fight in Oregon to take on the predatory payday lenders. In the U.S. Senate, he's fought to create and strengthen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first-ever federal agency with the sole mission of looking out for consumers in their everyday financial transactions.