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‘This is code red,’ Warren says of Musk targeting CFPB
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says it has returned more than $20 billion to consumers. The world's richest man has the agency in his crosshairs.
The Trump administration moved to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the weekend, provoking the ire of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
The senator, who played a pivotal role in the agency’s creation after the 2008 financial crisis, said Monday that Trump and his allies in the executive branch had no authority to shut down the CFPB.
Warren and other Democrats are focusing their messaging on Elon Musk and Russell Vought. Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” team has been running roughshod through Washington, avoiding public scrutiny despite promises of transparency. Now, the world’s richest man is working to gut an agency that says it has returned more than $20 billion to consumers since its creation.
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Vought, now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, was an architect of Project 2025. A policy roadmap for Trump’s second term, Project 2025 includes a litany of radical changes to the federal government aimed at enacting a conservative agenda. Vought has embraced Christian Nationalism and plainly stated that he wants to put federal bureaucrats “in trauma.”
“Congress built the CFPB, and no one other than Congress, not the president, not Musk, not Vought can shut it down,” Warren said in a video posted to X.
Warren and other congressional Democrats are scheduled to hold a rally outside the CFPB offices in Washington Monday afternoon to protest the Trump administration’s actions.
Warren built a national brand on her progressive policies targeting Wall Street and “big banks.” President Obama gave Warren credit for the CFPB’s creation, and she incorporated the agency’s success into her 2020 presidential campaign.
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The CFPB was created by Congress in 2011 and cannot be legally closed without congressional action. However, its director can take steps including halting enforcement and weakening regulations. Vought is now acting director of the CFPB.
“I’m ringing the alarm bell,” Warren told her followers on social media. “If [Musk and Vought] succeed, CEOs and Wall Street will once again be free to trick, trap, and cheat you.”
On Friday afternoon, Musk declared the CFPB dead in his own social media post. On Saturday, Vought directed the CFPB to stop nearly all its work, the Associated Press reported. By Sunday, officials said that the CFPB would be closed for the week.
The agency’s main webpage displayed an error message when accessed Monday, but the rest of the site appeared to still be accessible.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in the CFPB, filed two lawsuits against Vought on Sunday. One sought to block DOGE from accessing employee information, while the other asked a judge to block Vought’s directives to the CFPB, NBC News reported.
Congressional Democrats are calling Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s stop work order for the CFPB “illegal.”
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Musk has publicly considered moving X into payment services, and the company recently announced that it had struck a deal with Visa to process peer-to-peer payments. Entering into that world could bring X under CFPB oversight, Bloomberg reported.
Some of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle government agencies have been temporarily blocked by judges so far. But Vice President JD Vance and other allies are questioning the judiciary’s authority to check the power of the executive branch. Open defiance of the courts would exacerbate a constitutional crisis that many scholars say is already taking place.
The reasons Musk and Vought are targeting the CFPB is “not rocket science,” Warren said.
“Trump campaigned on helping working people. But now that he’s in charge, this is the payoff to the rich guys who invested in his campaign and who want to cheat families and not have anybody around to stop them,” she said. “It’s another scam.”
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