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“Elon Musk and his fellow oligarchs believe government and laws are simply an impediment to their interests and what they are entitled to…” Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent, Vermont 2/10/25
CFPB RIP
4:41 PM · Feb 7, 2025 49.6MViews
This is the communication a “special federal employee”, Elon Musk, used to let the world know he was going to unilaterally kill off a government agency created by Congress, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (see the above posting on X). How many of us think this is a professional way for an alleged federal employee to communicate with the people he serves? It’s more worthy of a grade schooler taunting a peer on the playground—and even then it is embarrassing. But that is who we have, along with his troop of teenage hackers, invading federal agencies and firing thousands of employees.
And how about the “mistaken” firing of 300 federal employees monitoring our nuclear stockpiles (who were employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, under the Department of Energy), which according to reports, the administration and its henchmen didn’t even know existed. This crew erased information on the employees so fast that it remains difficult to track them down and rehire these workers, who are critical to our national security.
Despite the widespread and constant chaos the Trump/Musk invasion continues to cause our government functions, the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) might be what the average American will feel most deeply. And it certainly will affect the approximate 30% of households living paycheck-to-paycheck.1
The CFPB was created by a bi-partisan act of Congress in 2010: The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Agency’s stated purpose:
…is to promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services. The CFPB will set and enforce clear, consistent rules that allow banks and other consumer financial services providers to compete on a level playing field and that let consumers see clearly the costs and features of products and services.
The functions of the CFPB to assist people in borrowing money or using other financial services include: implementing and enforcing Federal consumer financial laws; reviewing business practices to ensure that financial services providers are following the law; monitoring the marketplace and taking appropriate action to make sure markets work as transparently as they can for consumers; and establishing a toll-free consumer hotline and website for complaints and questions about consumer financial products and services.
According to Agency records, the CFPB has recovered and returned to consumers nearly $21 billion from misleading or fraudulent business practices of the financial industry. It even helps consumers correct mistakes on their credit reports, because it also oversees the three credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian and Transunion.
Under President Biden, the CFPB had been increasingly active in protecting consumers — it proposed and finalized regulations to prevent a certain amount of medical debt from being reported on consumers’ credit reports, eliminated “junk fees” and capped credit card late fees and overdraft charges. At least for the near future, these final regulations scheduled to go into effect this year are quashed.
According to a “stop work” email sent to all staff on February 3, 2025 by the CFPB’s acting director appointed by President Trump:
[Russell Vaught, the Bureau’s new acting director] and his aides ordered the bureau’s staff in an email to cease crafting regulations, enforcing rules, conducting probes or providing “public communications of any type,” according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post, which said he had instituted the ban “effective immediately.”
President Trump has long signaled he’d like to eliminate the Bureau entirely, and in fact, NBC reported a few days ago:
When asked this week if he could confirm whether it was his goal to completely eliminate the bureau, Trump said, “I would say yeah.“ “Because we’re trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse,” he said.
The NBC report also specifically noted that “the administration has not provided evidence to back up allegations of fraud at the agency”.
And according to a news report filed by the AP on February 12, President Trump also said, when asked about his attacks on the CFPB:
Trump on Monday defended his administration’s efforts to reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, saying the agency was “set up to destroy people.”
Set up to destroy people? A few years ago, I wrote about how the CFPB was created in 2011, primarily through the hard work and persistence of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and what it does to protect consumers like you and me. Audrey Hood, who writes the excellent Substack newsletter, The Civic Librarian, wrote a follow-up guest post for The Poverty Trap describing exactly how to access the Bureau’s Consumer Complaint database, what information is found there and how you can file a complaint against a financial institution.
This is what the home page of the CFPB looks like now, although much of the website appears operational, and the public can still access information:
404: Page not found
We can’t find the page you’re looking for. Visit our homepage for helpful tools and resources, or contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.
Are you sure this is the right web address? Let us know
Also last week, the Bureau’s acting head fired about 170 workers, and reportedly has plans to fire 95% of all CFPB staff. This is a telling interview with one of the fired CFPB employees, attorney Elizabeth Aniskevich, that aired on CNN yesterday. It’s the other side of the story that we’re getting from Musk and President Trump:
Fortunately, a federal district court ruled, on Valentine’s Day, to stop the mass firing at the Bureau (employees could not be fired without just cause), to prevent the administration from taking down any information on its website, including all data gathered by the CFPB, and to continue to allow funding to the Bureau. This decision is a temporary order until the merits of the case can be decided.
The irony is the CFPB has used the last 15 years to prevent waste and fraud caused by the financial industry’s practices and to protect the consumer from this industry’s scams to increase their profits. The Trump Administration, on the other hand, claims it is somehow preventing waste and fraud by eliminating this agency. It is the consumers who need protection from the financial industry, not the other way around.
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I’d love to hear your thoughts about the CFPB, its attempted “deletion” and what’s going on with the Trump/Musk invasion of our federal agencies and our privacy. Please leave your comments below:
According to a 2024 Bank of America Survey. Note: There are pretty broad variations in the number of those who report living paycheck to paycheck and how analysts interpret this reporting. Some prefer to call it “tightly budgeted”.
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