Senate Republicans voted to give Elon Musk and Big Tech the ability to operate payment apps without any meaningful oversight or accountability, a step that will leave millions vulnerable to financial predators and scammers.
As Christine Chen Zinner, a senior policy counsel at the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform, pointed out in an interview, the agency has been politically under siege since its creation. “We have a bad feeling about the direction that it’s going,” she said. “This is an agency that was created after a devastating financial crisis because there were regulatory gaps.”
At the behest of the new Trump-appointed leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has abandoned an enforcement case against megabank Capital One, a step that will cost consumers $2 billion in restitution.
Chants of “let us work!” rang out across the courtyard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) blocks away from the White House on Monday, as hundreds of angry protesters rallied against the Trump administration’s decision to suspend all operations at the US’s top financial watchdog – an agency that has clawed back more than $21bn from Wall Street for defrauded consumers.
Elon Musk has spent years laying the groundwork to transform X into a digital payments platform. Now he appears to be helping dismantle the agency that would oversee it.
The new staff purges at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will allow Wall Street, predatory lenders, and many other financial companies to rip off their own customers without any recourse to an agency that has won $21 billion in relief for consumers in its 14-year history.
Today, the Republican House majority revealed draft legislation to stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) overdraft rule from going into effect on October 1, 2025. The CFPB’s overdraft fee rule will reduce big bank overdraft fees from $35 per transaction down to $5, a move that will save the 23 million households in the United States that pay overdraft fees $5 billion annually, or $225 per family.
The CFPB’s proposal would prohibit financial companies from forcing consumers to surrender their fundamental rights in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that are used for everyday services such as bank accounts, credit cards, and payment apps on smart phones.
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) finalized its Personal Financial Data Rights proposal, a long-overdue measure that can help create a more consumer-friendly and competitive financial services marketplace.
The just-filed Department of Justice lawsuit against Visa marks a necessary, but not the only, step needed to challenge the anticompetitive practices by the credit card and payment processing company that penalize consumers and restrains robust competition.