President Trump confirmed on Monday that his goal is to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he said “was set up to destroy people.”
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, Trump was asked on Monday afternoon to confirm that his goal was to have the CFPB totally eliminated.
“I would say, yeah, because we’re trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse,” he said, according to a video posted on the social media network X.
Trump praised his administration for shutting the CFPB and used the past tense to describe the bureau.
“We did the right thing,” he said. “That was a very important thing to get rid of, and it was also a waste. I mean, number one, it was a bad group of people running it, but it was also a waste.”
The CFPB can only be abolished by Congress, though Republicans are working on a plan to include
Separately, on Tuesday, two senior CFPB officials — Eric Halperin, the bureau’s
At the White House on Monday, Trump was first asked by a reporter to respond to concerns from Democrats — and specifically Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the CFPB’s architect — that freezing the bureau’s funding was giving “a green light to corporations.”
At the mention of Warren’s name, he immediately launched into a verbal onslaught about her native American heritage before mentioning the CFPB.
“Pocahontas, Pocahontas, the fake, the faker,” he said, to laughter from someone standing next to him. “You know, that was set up to destroy people. She used that as her little, personal agency to go around and destroy people. And she’s a fake. Just like she said she was an Indian, and she wasn’t an Indian.”
Trump then looked at the reporter and said: “You have more Indian blood in you than she has.”
Trump’s pejorative comments about Warren were a throwback to the 2016 presidential campaign when he goaded the senator about her ancestry. He continued the rant.
“She went to college based on the fact that she was an Indian. She got jobs based on the fact that she was an Indian. She’s a fake,” Trump said, before returning to the subject of the CFPB. “That was, that was set up to destroy some very good people. And it worked. I mean, it worked, a lot of great people. I tell you, before I ever heard the term, people would come up to me in the Midwest and areas and say, ‘Sir, I’m being destroyed by them.’ They use that to destroy people. She’s a nasty woman. She’s a really nasty woman, despite her phony beer commercial.”
Trump was referring
The Trump takeover of the CFPB began in earnest on Friday when at least three staffers with the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, arrived at the agency.
On Friday afternoon, the Trump administration named Russell Vought the acting CFPB director. Vought had been confirmed on Thursday to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a role he held in the first Trump administration. An architect of the conservative Project 2025 blueprint for remaking the federal government, Vought
On Sunday the National Treasury Employees Union filed two lawsuits against Vought and DOGE to block the directives ordering the staff to cease all supervision and examination activity.
The CFPB was created by Warren when she was a Harvard Law School professor. She gained attention after writing an article for The Journal of Consumer Affairs suggesting the creation of an agency to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis. Warren helped stand up the agency in 2011 and ran successfully for Congress in 2012.
Though Trump spoke about the CFPB for just two minutes, he seemed to refer at one point to the tie when Warren ran the agency nearly 15 years ago.
“If you looked at when she really ran it, wow, that was a vicious group of people,” Trump said. “They really destroyed a lot of people.”