Why the Attack On This Agency Is Trump/Muskism In a Nutshell

The CFPB, which exists to protect consumers, is everything they hate about government and everything Elon Musk wants out of his way.

Photo by Tony Webster

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The attempt by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention, but another agency the two are working to dismantle — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — may be even more revealing of their methods and their motivations. Understand what’s happening with the CFPB and why, and you begin to see the whole picture of the attack now being waged on the American system of government — and on whose behalf it is occurring.

What we have here is the convergence of three separate forces pushing in the same direction. First, there’s Musk’s interest in undermining the government’s ability to police corporate malfeasance generally, but in particular the malfeasance of his own companies, so he can be completely unencumbered as he seeks ever more money and control over our national life. Second, there’s the interest of the Project 2025 crowd — in the person of its most important figure, newly installed Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought — in destroying government as a force that protects ordinary people from those with power. And finally, there’s Trump’s interest in causing chaos and destroying anything that has Barack Obama’s or Joe Biden’s fingerprints on it.

What the CFPB is and why Republicans hate it

There are many reasons why Republicans hate the CFPB, but at bottom this is a simple question of ideology. The agency enforces existing laws and protects consumers from mistreatment by banks, credit card companies, payday lenders, and others who would scam, defraud, or exploit them. Republicans don’t like that, and they never have; their vision of capitalism is one in which we allow the visionary and virtuous captains of industry to pursue ever-greater wealth unencumbered by pesky government bureaucrats.

Even worse, the agency is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who proposed creating a government entity to protect Americans from financial scams and fraud in a 2007 article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas while she was still a law professor at Harvard. The article begins as follows: “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street – and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner.”

After shady mortgages led to a global financial collapse the very next year, the idea of creating such an agency gained momentum, and it was included in the sweeping Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that passed in 2010.

The CFPB has a very simple mission: Protect consumers. Republicans opposed it from the beginning, and when Trump became president in 2017 he did his best to neuter the agency. But it managed to survive, and Biden revived it when he took office.

And in carrying out that mission, it has been a spectacular success. According to the CFPB web site (on a page the DOGEbros will no doubt soon be taking down), as of December it had returned over $21 billion to consumers, imposed over $5 billion in penalties on companies and individuals that violated the law, forced changes to bank overdraft policies that will save consumers over $6 billion, obtained $363 million in relief for members of the military (who are often targeted by financial scams), and much more.

The attack commences

So when he came into office, Trump put a target on the CFPB. Musk’s army soon arrived, backed up by Vought, who after being confirmed as OMB chief was also made acting director of the CFPB.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported new and disturbing details about the DOGEbros’ takeover of the agency. Four young Musk staffers showed up there and ensconced themselves in the basement, avoiding contact with the staff. At first, they had read-only access to a limited number of agency documents. But they were just getting started:

Then, late Friday night, the DOGE staffers were granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems, including sensitive bank examination and enforcement records, according to five people familiar with the matter and emails seen by Bloomberg News…

A few hours later, CFPB’s X account was deleted, and the home page of the agency’s website was partially dismantled…

[Saturday] night, Vought began to lay the groundwork for overhauling and at least temporarily shutting down the CFPB. He sent an email to all the agency’s employees under the subject line, “Directives on Bureau Activities,” which prohibited them from issuing any public communications, continuing pending investigations or launching new probes. It also ended all supervision and examinations.

Another email went out Monday morning, informing employees that the offices of the agency are closed and “employees should stand down from performing any work task.” Lawsuits have been filed by employee unions to reverse these orders and revoke the DOGEbros’ access to confidential information, but in the meantime the agency has all but ceased to exist.

Russ Vought has long held the CFPB in contempt, and if you’re wondering if Project 2025, of which Vought was one of key architects, previewed these very actions, give yourself a gold star: It says, “The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional. Congress should abolish the CFPB,” and suggests that “the next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency.”

So it’s clear where Vought is coming from. But why, you may ask, would Elon Musk be so interested in destroying the CFPB? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that Musk has long had dreams of turning X into an “everything app” that would not only be your source for the latest in neo-Nazi memes but would also be the place for your banking and online purchases. Just weeks ago X announced a partnership with Visa that will allow for online payments through the site.

So not only would it be a major hassle for Musk if there were too much government oversight of the inevitable tide of fraud and scams that could well follow, but by sending his underlings into all of CFPB’s systems, Musk now has access to confidential information about his competitors in the payment app business.

And you know who else is absolutely stoked about the Trump administration killing the CFPB? You’ll never guess:

That’s right, the crypto industry. How interesting, that a bunch of dudes getting rich off speculative frenzies, scammy meme coins, and the occasional outright fraud are giddy at the prospect of the government’s financial watchdog going dark.

And finally, there’s Donald Trump, who has a very personal reason to hate the CFPB: Although it never brought any actions against Trump University, the Trump Institute, the Trump Network, or any of the other grifts on which he built a career, the very idea of an agency committed to policing cons is no doubt offensive to a lifelong con artist like him. The world is supposed to be a place where the strong prey on the weak, not one where the weak can go to the government and ask for help after they’ve been preyed on.

So this, ladies and gentlemen, is what “the party of the working class” does when it takes power: It attacks government at nearly every level, not just what’s supposedly wasteful or too “woke,” but the things government does to protect ordinary people from exploitation and victimization by those determined to separate you from your money, even in violation of the law. And when it comes to a conflict between the average person’s interest and that of corporations — especially bad corporate actors — Republicans are going to choose the latter every time. And they’re feeling emboldened to go farther than they ever have before.