Democrats decry Trump CFPB | American Banker

Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., organized a “forum” hearing Tuesday to underscore the positive influence that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has had on Americans’ financial lives and the damage that the Trump administration is having on the agency, vowing to fight the administration in court.

Speaking at a press event prior to the hearing, Warren said Trump’s promises to lower costs for working families are belied by his administration’s extraordinary efforts to dismantle an agency designed to assist victims of fraud in recouping their losses and policing consumer financial products. 

“Donald Trump promised that he was going to lower costs for American families on day one — those were his words,” Warren said. “Instead he and his co-president Elon Musk are doing everything they can to take down the agency that has recovered $21 billion over the last dozen years for people who got cheated and scammed. That’s also in violation of the law.”

The bureau has been closed for weeks after acting director and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought directed CFPB employees to stop all work, vowing to slash the agency’s funding. The Department of Government Efficiency — a rebranded version of the U.S. Digital Service created by Trump in an executive order and de facto led by White House advisor and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk — gained access to the CFPB, a move Senate Democrats decried. The Department of Justice said in a court filing Monday that the administration will not seek to terminate the bureau, but instead said that it shuttered its offices and placed its workers on administrative leave in response to a rally at the bureau headquarters, though that rally occurred after the bureau was shuttered.

Warren — who first conceived of the notion of a consumer protection agency while a Harvard law professor after the Great Financial Crisis — added that while Musk may want to “delete” the CFPB, neither he nor anyone else in the executive branch has that power.

“Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — read the constitution, baby,” Warren said. “Only Congress can actually get rid of it. Elon Musk does not have the power. Right now we’re in the courts, and we’re asking the courts to enforce the law.”

During the forum, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called out Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., and House Financial Service Committee Chair French Hill, R-Ark., for failing to schedule a hearing in the appropriate committees of jurisdiction on the administration’s attack on the bureau. Instead, he said, the committee chairs have introduced a joint resolution to rescind the bureau’s rule limiting credit card late fees to $8.

“This is what we’re doing. Do you think the banking committee under Republican leadership would have a hearing on this? No way,” Schumer said. “But we are, and we’re bringing this to the public’s attention, and we’re asking Americans to fight back.”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., said the involvement of Musk — who owns electric car manufacturer Tesla and social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter — in the dismantling of the CFPB presents enormous conflicts of interest because his access to sensitive nonpublic information housed at the agency could benefit his businesses and gain an unfair advantage over his competition. That access by Musk — whom the administration has recently said is not in charge of DOGE but who nonetheless appears to wield considerable influence in its operations — could have a chilling effect on consumers who should be able to trust that their personal financial information will be protected by a federal agency, she said.

“Who is Elon Musk?” Cortez Masto asked rhetorically. “He’s private sector — he’s not even a government employee. He’s a billionaire. Who are these individuals who are getting access to federal government information on Americans? There should be an outrage and an uproar about what is going on here.”