President Donald Trump’s energy secretary and two of his major donors won a key victory last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to back off a rule requiring large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and any plans to reduce them.
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.
The only federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers and going after financial fraud by big banks, credit bureaus, and shady lenders, has been all but shut down, creating a new challenge for consumers who want to manage their finances well but now lack the services of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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, including Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, have become particularly critical of the watchdog, as the agency has turned its eye toward Silicon Valley.
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.
Last week, newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team access to all of the federal government payments data. Musk’s team of tech bros are currently upending and disrupting the entire federal government without clear statutory authority or congressional approval.
Christine Chen Zinner, a senior lawyer for Americans for Financial Reform, a progressive consumer advocacy group, said: “Those billions that Chopra got back for consumers meant less profit for the industry. If Trump really cared about everyday people, he’d keep Chopra around.”
“Signs are mounting that the second Trump administration will try, like the first iteration, to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mission and capacity to safeguard the rights and wallets of families throughout the United States,” Americans for Financial Reform said in a statement last week.