Claire Williams
WASHINGTON — Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., joined a protest that filled up the square outside of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Monday afternoon.
The protest, headlined by Warren and other Democratic lawmakers — including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and House Financial Services Committee ranking member Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — rallied against the Department of Government Efficiency shuttering headquarters for the week and pausing the bureau’s work. An estimated 600 people attended, according to the event’s organizers.
Rallygoers chanted slogans supporting the CFPB, ranging from “Let us work,” and “Who are we? CFPB. What do we do? We work for you,” to “1234, consumers are worth fighting for, 5678, Dodd-Frank is pretty great.”
The lawmakers sought to emphasize conflicts of interest between Elon Musk — the head of DOGE and a billionaire entrepreneur with a variety of business interests — and DOGE’s work, which includes taking some measure of control over sensitive payments data at the Treasury Department. Musk’s social network X recently announced a partnership with Visa, allowing users to make purchases directly through the social media channel.
“Elon wants X money to touch every part of your financial life, but Elon has got a problem, the financial cops,” Warren said. “The CFPB is there to make sure that Elon’s new project can’t scam you or steal your sensitive personal data, so Elon’s solution? Get rid of the cops.”
The CFPB holds a wealth of data about financial companies, including banks, from supervision records to individual data about consumers like bank accounts and social security numbers and proprietary data about financial companies’ offerings and contracts.
“I worry about their access to all of this very sensitive information, and what they would do with that,” Van Hollen told American Banker. “This is a very dangerous moment, that’s why we’re fighting back.”
Seventeen lawmakers attended the protest, including several Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee. Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Emmanuel Cleaver of Missouri, Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Nydia Velázquez of New York, Bill Foster of Connecticut, Gregory Meeks of New York and Brad Sherman of California all turned up for the rally.
Other attendees at the protest included CFPB employees from the bureau’s union, representatives of consumer groups and — for the most part — concerned private citizens and consumers.
Noel Evans, a caregiving specialist who said he lives in D.C., said he attended the CFPB protest because the bureau once helped him resolve an identity theft issue when someone applied for unemployment benefits under his name even though he was employed.
“The fact that this has been shut down is such an affront to this country,” he said.
Claire Williams
Nadine Seiler of Waldorf, Maryland said that she was attending the protest because she is concerned about the power that DOGE and Musk hold in the administration, and the legality of what they’re doing at federal agencies.
Barbara Best, who said that she’s from the D.C. area, said that she retired from the U.S. Agency for International Development a few years ago and has been following DOGE’s efforts to dismantle that agency closely.
“I’m here today because they’re trying to do the same thing” to the CFPB, she said.
The Democratic lawmakers present pledged to withhold votes for everything from nominations to budget negotiations in protest. Warren, who is often credited with creating the CFPB with her proposals as an academic before she was elected to the Senate, reinvigorated the crowd with promises to challenge Musk and Trump’s shuttering of federal agencies.
“This fight is about more than one little agency, this fight is about more than just our financial rules and regulations, this fight is about more than just Democrat and Republican politics,” Warren said. “This fight is about hard working people versus the billionaires who want to squeeze more and more, now is our time to put a stop to this.”