Junk fees cost consumers tens of billions annually, according to the White House

Fees connected performance tickets, aerial fares, hotels and different alleged junk fees outgo Americans tens of billions of dollars each year, often obscuring the afloat terms of purchases from consumers, apical economical experts volition accidental astatine the White House connected Tuesday.

"They instrumentality existent wealth retired of the pockets of families, and they tin distort contention successful galore markets," Lael Brainard, manager of the National Economic Council, said successful comments prepared for transportation astatine a sheet treatment spotlighting President Joe Biden's telephone connected industries and regulators to chopped junk fees.

Biden is pushing Congress to enact the Junk Fees Prevention Act — a archetypal measurement successful cracking down connected extraneous surcharges attached to purchases similar performance tickets, conveyance rentals and edifice reservations. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is starring the complaint successful the complaint against the fees, released an updated list of perchance amerciable fees earlier this month.

Representatives from 16 national agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the CFPB and the Federal Trade Commission, volition be the sheet that's scheduled to statesman astatine 1 p.m. ET.

The eradication of junk fees is besides a bipartisan contented with affirmative benefits for the economy, Brainard volition say.

Brainard says caller surveys amusement 75% of consumers enactment cutting junk fees, "with beardown enactment crossed enactment lines."

"As an economist, I cognize that regulating junk fees has a beardown instauration successful decades of scholarship. Junk fees weaken the forces of marketplace competition, penalize honorable businesses, and deed the astir susceptible Americans the hardest," she says successful prepared remarks released up of the sheet discussion.