Can't Quit Your Gym? Biden Team Touts Crackdown On Customer Service Red Tape

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday touted its efforts to crack down on aggravating company practices of making customers wait on hold and jump through hoops to cancel subscriptions.

The “Time Is Money” initiative is an array of proposals, including a pending regulation, that the administration says will save consumers money and also cut down on “general aggravation” resulting from deliberately poor customer service.

“The administration is cracking down on all the ways that companies — through paperwork, hold times and general aggravation — waste people’s money, waste people’s time,” White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden told reporters on Friday.

“For example, you want to cancel your gym membership or subscription service to a newspaper,” Tanden said. “It took one or two clicks to sign up, but now to end your subscription or cancel the membership, you have to go in person or wait on hold for 20 minutes.”

President Joe Biden has made cracking down on “junk fees,” such as processing payments that are excluded from advertised prices, a centerpiece of his economic agenda. The new proposals are an effort to burnish Democrats’ image as consumer champions at a time when the economy has been a major advantage for Republicans thanks largely to high inflation.

Like any administrative action not built on new laws, however, the policies could be subject to a quick reversal next year, either by a Republican president or Republicans in Congress.

The centerpiece of the initiative is a draft rule, introduced by the Federal Trade Commission in March of last year, aimed at requiring companies to make it as easy for customers to cancel services as it was to sign up, such as by using the same website with the