President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night that seeks to give more power to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cleave through the supposed “waste, bloat, and insularity” in the federal government. The team is being given broad permission by Trump to disrupt work at key agencies and cut jobs. This expanded power likely means even more chaos within federal agencies, but for a specific preview of what’s to come—and the potential consequences for Americans—look no further than the past week at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
On Thursday, operatives from DOGE swept into CFPB headquarters and set up shop, according to three agency employees I spoke with. (Each of the employees requested anonymity, fearing reprisal.) The next day, Musk posted a mission statement of sorts to his X account: “CFPB RIP 🪦.” By Saturday afternoon, one employee told me, three DOGE workers were installed in the building’s basement, where they plugged away in rooms whose internal windows had been papered over. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB’s acting director, announced on Saturday that the organization’s funding would be cut off, and employees were later told that the Washington headquarters would be closed this week. By Monday, CFPB employees had been told to “stand down from performing any work task,” and at least six DOGE affiliates were listed in the internal staff directory. Yesterday, two senior leaders resigned, and dozens of workers were fired. (Spokespeople for DOGE, the CFPB, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
The takeover should be of great interest to the many Americans who benefited from its work. Since its launch in 2011—a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the CFPB has focused on protecting Americans from various forms of financial fraud and deception. (In 2022, for example, the CFPB ordered Wells Fargo to pay billions in damages and fines for several legal violations, including wrongfully repossessing borrowers’ cars.) No other federal regulator exists to safeguard consumers from such abuse. Closing the bureau would be like “telling fraudsters it’s open season on consumers,” Adam Levitin, a professor of law and finance at Georgetown, told me. Shady fintech companies would have less to worry about, lending standards could deteriorate, consumers experiencing fraud would not have a clear way to seek help from the federal government, and so on. Paul Krugman wrote that the current attack on the agency seems to be part of an effort “to make predatory finance great again.”
The CFPB’s mission is widely popular among Americans, based on polling across the political spectrum. Many Republican lawmakers have long opposed the agency, however, accusing it of regulatory overreach. Recently, Musk and certain other tech leaders, such as Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, have become particularly critical of the watchdog, as the agency has turned its eye toward Silicon Valley. The CFPB has been taking steps to ensure that “Big Tech players are playing by the same rules as any other financial-services institution,” Julie Margetta Morgan, a former associate director at the CFPB who resigned after Trump’s inauguration this year, told me. The agency was investigating Meta for alleged misuse of financial data in targeted advertising (Meta has previously said it disagrees with the agency’s claims and declined to comment when I reached out for this story). CFPB also recently took steps to more formally expand its oversight to payment services, which could include Venmo and Apple Pay, among others. Now those efforts will be stalled indefinitely.
The Trump administration does not appear to have the authority to unilaterally shut CFPB down. Outright demolishing the agency is “obviously unconstitutional,” Mike Konczal, a former chief economist for the National Economic Council, told me. The CFPB was created by Congress through the Dodd-Frank Act; to fully dismantle it would likewise require congressional action. On Sunday, the union that represents CFPB employees brought two lawsuits against Vought: one seeking to block the stop-work order, the other alleging privacy violations. (Vought did not respond to requests for comment.)
But legal action will take time, and a temporary pause could still be damaging. One of the watchdog’s most important consumer-facing services is a complaints-reporting system where people struggling to resolve an issue with a private company—such as inaccurate information on their credit report—can request the agency’s assistance. Over the years, the agency says it has helped resolve millions of complaints; its processes tens of thousands every week. Without workers to oversee the system, it may start to break down. And although a unilaterally imposed long-term shutdown may be illegal, the CFPB’s director still has significant discretion over the agency’s activities and can hamstring it from within. During the first Trump administration, those in charge of the agency significantly pulled back on various rulemaking and enforcement efforts.
Even if the watchdog somehow remains fully intact, or is streamlined in some way that still serves the public, Americans should understand what it means for Musk’s team—largely made up of individuals with little to no experience handling sensitive government information—to have widespread access to CFPB systems. According to Bloomberg, on Friday, DOGE was “granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems.” If this is accurate, one employee told me, it would mean that DOGE employees have access to customer information, such as names, addresses, and aspects of their financial history. The agency, which regularly interacts with and investigates private companies, is home to significant amounts of confidential industry information. That can include trade secrets, whistleblower information, and employee and profitability data, according to two of the employees—some of which may belong to Musk’s competitors. “We don’t have employees from Google or Apple or PayPal just walking into our buildings saying, ‘Give me access to your systems,’” one employee told me.
Among Musk’s business interests that directly conflict with the CFPB’s work is Tesla. Over the years, the agency has received hundreds complaints about Tesla, many of which have to do with disputes over auto lending. (In fairness, the agency also receives complaints about many other car companies.) In late January, X announced a partnership with Visa as a part of an initiative called “X Money,” which will add Venmo-like features to the social-media platform. Once it debuts, this, too, would likely fall under the CFPB’s purview. That is, if the bureau still exists.
Musk and others are well within their right to criticize the CFPB. Levitin, at Georgetown, has himself disagreed with some of the CFPB’s actions over the past few years—in particular its tendency to announce policy by suing companies instead of advancing regulation, he told me. But to dismantle the watchdog on the grounds that it bears an excessive cost on the American people, as Musk alleged in a post on Monday, is plainly incorrect. “If you look at dollars spent relative to dollars recovered,” said Levitin, the agency “has recovered far more for consumers than it’s ever spent in its entirety on operations.” Musk says DOGE should save taxpayers money, but the CFPB has been doing that all along.
