Yves here. It’s important to keep shredding defenses of the Musk wrecking ball operation. If he really care about cost reduction, the Pentagon and related military spending would be top of his list. Why, for instance, yet not a peep about why we need nearly 800 bases overseas and which might be suitable for closure?
By Jon Queally, managing editor of Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Defenders of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has returned tens of billions of dollars to duped and defrauded U.S. consumers expressed outrage overnight and into Saturday after the independent agency was declared deceased by billionaire Elon Musk and its operations were handed over to the chief architect of the far-right Project 2025 Russell Vought.
Vought, who earlier this week was confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget by Senate Republicans, was named acting director of the CFPB by President Donald Trump, according to various reports.
The appointment of the far-right ideologue came less than a day after reports emerged that members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) were granted access to key CFPB systems and Musk himself posted to his online social media X that the agency should “RIP,” suggesting it was in the process of being dismantled or, in his mind, already killed.
“Since its creation, the Bureau has returned $21 billion to people’s wallets by fighting against illegal financial charges, junk fees, debts, and fraud,” said Mike Calhoun, president of the nonpartisan Center for Responsible Lending, in a statement on Saturday. Now, when people are already struggling to pay higher prices for necessities like eggs and milk, the Trump administration appears to have decided to deepen the pain by directly taking aim at the agency that helps keep our money safe.”
“‘Let them eat debt’ is not a strategy for making America great again,” Calhoun added, “and weakening the CFPB certainly isn’t the way to keep working families, our financial markets, or our economy strong.”
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which challenges corporate encroachment on the common good, said, “Obviously this isn’t about ‘efficiency.’ It’s about dismantling law enforcement that protects Americans from corporate power.”
Congressional Democrats also reacted with contempt to Musk’s message and the news that the agency’s systems—like those of other agencies DOGE has put its hands on—were under threat.
The richest man in the world wants to shut down an agency that keeps people like him from ripping off the rest of us.
CFPB has returned billions of $$ to Americans who’ve been screwed by Big Banks and Big Tech.
Fire Elon Musk.https://t.co/Q1ziMBxUIv
— Congressman Greg Casar (@RepCasar) February 7, 2025
“Here is the richest man in the world bragging about eliminating an agency that has delivered $21 billion back to working-class families since its inception,” said Democrats on the House Committee on Financial Services, led by Ranking Member Maxine Waters of California. “Even most Republicans want the CFPB to continue protecting them from being ripped off by abusive big banks and predatory lenders.”
The CFPB costs $800 Million annually and has returned over $21 Billion to consumers cheated by banks, credit card companies, payday lenders, and scammers. Yesterday, the richest man in the world @ElonMusk, said he’s going to kill it, hurting millions of working-class American… https://t.co/wx5KsBJYEX pic.twitter.com/0wcV7JTVn4
— Rep. Marcy Kaptur (@RepMarcyKaptur) February 8, 2025
“Here are the FACTS: 81% of voters, both Republicans and Democrats, support the CFPB and want the agency to continue its work,” said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), also a member of the committee. “Even so, Trump has moved to freeze the CFPB to take money out of YOUR pocket to line those of his billionaire friends.”
In a letter sent to the CFPB on Friday—addressed to the previous acting director, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose first act of business was reportedly to order a halt of “all meaningful work”—Waters, Vargas, and 79 other Democratic members of the House said they were “deeply alarmed and troubled that you appear to be launching the Trump Administration’s plan to contravene the will of Congress and unlawfully ‘delete’ this popular consumer watchdog that enjoys the broad bipartisan support of four out of five Americans.”
According to the letter:
… we understand that you have ordered staff to halt all meaningful work of the CFPB, including ordering staff to stop investigating violations of consumer financial protection laws or settling enforcement actions, basically letting bad actors off the hook. We also understand that you have arbitrarily ordered the suspension of all CFPB rules that have yet to take effect, which would delay billions of dollars in savings and credit opportunities for consumers, if not rob them entirely.
We urge you to immediately rescind what appears to be an illegal stop work order and allow the public servants at the CFPB to get back to work for the American people as required by law.
As of this writing, the CFPB’s homepage (www.consumerfinance.gov) prominently displayed a 404 error message, though portions of the site appeared to be active.
In a Saturday statement, the Democrats on the House Finance Committee said the 404 image on the CFPB website was intentionally “deceptive,” calling it “a brazen attempt to fool consumers and the public about the status” of the agency.
“As of this moment, links and pages are still up and functional on the website,” the statement said, “including the Consumer Complaint portal and database and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database. Various aspects of the CFPB’s web content is required by statute to be published and available on the CFPB’s website.”
Nadine Chabrier, counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said the “deeply troubling” developments at the agency will “undermine the CFPB’s mission to protect consumers from financial misconduct” of various kinds.
“CFPB has returned more than $20,000,000,000 to consumers since it was founded,” said Rep. Gabe Amo (D-R.I.) on Friday evening in response to Musk’s tweet. “Let’s be clear: the people cheering this the loudest are scammers and people who don’t want you to keep your hard-earned dollars. So much for lowering costs.”
Is there any data on the money earmarked for Musk’s ventures with the defense department?
If you want to send your thoughts to Elon himself you can use these email addresses
elonmuskoffice@teslamotors.com
or
elonm@x.com
You mean, if you want to send your thoughts to some AI.
Darn straight. The easiest $5B in savings would be to announce that the remaining money from “Swamp Stooge” Mikey Johnson’s $61B aid bill signed by Biden last year is no longer “a going concern.”
Then start recalling weapons back to the US.
Musk could also go after all of the abuse coming from the Medicare advantage program where the large health insurance companies over-diagnose and charge the government for services not rendered.
I don’t mean to seem rude, but there is no evidence Musk intends to do anything that will muss the hair of private companies. The intent is to gut government operations like a fish so that they are either abandoned or taken up by corporations.
Yves, I agree with you 100%. The way I see it is billionaires spend their lives obsessing over money. The only thing that threatens them is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve can debase the currency quicker than a billionaire can earn it. What billionaires don’t control, and they are control freaks at heart, is the value of their dollar holdings. They hate that government can debase their wealth after they made sacrifices to achieve it and turn it over to people they feel didn’t do anything worthy to deserve it. Therefore, in absence of a gold standard, their only solution is to strip government down to its bare minimum by eliminating outright, or to hand over control of any necessary piece to a corporation or back to the States (i.e. non-currency issuers, I’m not going down the rabbit hole of stock certificates being another form of currency). Once this is achieved, my feeling is you’ll see a push for the US government to recognize payment of taxes in some form of digital currency with the aim of someday sunsetting the US dollar. This will put further artificial constraints around currency debasement.
This no doubt pertains to his plans to offer a Visa-based payment system on the X (Twitter) portal. Most of what Musk touches is for self-aggrandizement and to steer consumers and public funding onto one of his projects. That was certainly true with his Boring company, which was designed to get public subsidies into one of his schemes while destroying public transit.
I’d just like to share a personal story on the CFPB. Last summer I ran into some frustratingly bad customer service from a credit card company and an airline that shall go unnamed. Unnamed because I see no point in naming and shaming when customer service has gotten so awful that they’re all rotten apples.
It involved a promise made to me at the bag dropoff by an agent, that turned out to be basically fraudulent inducement. Several benefits were promised if I signed up for a credit card with loyalty points tied to the airline.
Fast forward about a year, and most of the benefits turned out to be illusory. I’m sure there was something in the fine print that may have gotten them off in court, but it was IMO a verbal offer that was fraudulent.
I tried writing letters to the airline, credit card company, etc. all to no avail. When I filed a case with the CFPB, lo and behold, about a month later I got a letter from them in the mail saying that the matter has been investigated and the credit card company offered me a whole bunch of airline miles plus the free companion certificate they’d promised me. I accepted the offer and the matter was closed.
If it hadn’t been for the CFPB I’d have had no recourse other than the courts. I was very impressed by how quickly the CFPB dealt with my complaint, and how they were able to bulldoze through the wall of BS I was told by the customer service agents of both the airline and the CC company (they pointed the finger at each other, a classic blame-shifting technique.)
Of course Trump, Musk etc claim they are going to save the country “trillions” which would be more than 20 billion. And in their latest pronouncements they say they are going after the Pentagon although that remains so very much to be seen.
Meanwhile the Dems are the ones who saved the predatory banks in 2008 and are now doing so much of the complaining. I’d say Liz Warren is no more to be trusted than Trump is.
Which is the problem isn’t it? Our entire ruling class has discredited itself and so we now have a president who may be more guilty of being not very bright and fond of dubious associates than of being an outright crook like Biden. A plague on all their houses I say. NC had the excellent interview the other day about “entropy economics” and how the much ignored psychological factor plays into economic life. Our American idea seems to be in its decadent phase. So the notion of making us great again could be the real scam–at least with this crew in both parties.
In terms of dollar value, Biden was millions, Trump is at least a hundred million.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-meme-coin-2-billion-ls-1235261422/
Trump said yesterday that Musk would audit the Pentagon.
Why do they keep using the word audit?
DOGE is massive agnotology because there have been many studies of government waste, so we know roughly and often specifically what should be changed, if the goal really were to save money.
I notice that Marcy Kaptur’s tweet says the CFPB costs $800 million/year. It’s been around since 2011, so that would be approximately $10.5 billion that it has cost so far, which is half of the $21 billion returned to victims of financial fraud.
That very roughly compares to the sort of money you’d expect to flow to a lawyer’s pockets, say, if you tried to recover money from an insurance company you had to sue or something. (So I’ve heard; somebody with more experience would know better than me.) I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising—maybe we should think of the CFPB as a kind of public mega-lawyer to sic on parts of the financial industry. And therefore it costs a lot (and therefore doesn’t look too “efficient”).
800 million a year for an agency with about 2,000 employees. That’s $400,000 per employee.
I couldn’t quickly find any studies on the economic benefits of the CFPB cracking down on the financial sector in discouraging their rip-off of consumers, but I did find this quote by Dean Baker on some of the positive effects of the efforts of the CFPB:
“This is not only good for consumers; it is good for the economy. We want the financial industry to be devoting resources to finding better ways to serve consumers in order to win business away from competitors, not to figuring out more ways to rip them off. The CFPB should reduce the incentives in the rip-off direction.”
I say amen to that!
https://cepr.net/publications/the-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-a-government-agency-for-promoting-growth/
As for estimating the cost/benefit ratio of the CFPB budget, I think one could reasonably assume a multiplier effect for the $21B going back to consumers, who can then spend that money in productive and constructive ways. Since too much of government spending has little or virtually no multiplier effect– or even a negative impact, such as the $700B bailout of the TBTF banksters, for example– I think that we can assume that Taner Edis’ estimation of a $10.5B direct cost of the CFPB during the time it saved $21B was money well spent, since even a low but reasonable multiplier of 2 would yield a net 1 to 4 cost to benefit ratio for every dollar spent on the CFPB.