The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has another new leader with the appointment of Russell Vought, the newly sworn-in director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), taking over the agency as acting director.
The Wall Street Journal, sourcing its coverage on input from unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” reported Vought emailed the agency’s top staff on Friday evening to announce his new role. Vought takes over from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was named acting director on Monday following President Trump’s dismissal of Rohit Chopra, who was named CFPB director by then-President Biden in 2021.
Vought’s email also ordered the CFPB staff to grant access to all “non-classified” systems to the members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who came to the agency Thursday night requesting read-only access to the regulator’s data, systems, and equipment. The union representing CFPB staff denounced the DOGE access, claiming “legally-protected, sensitive data of businesses and individuals will be exposed and used in inappropriate ways.” A protest by CFPB staff members outside of their workplace is reportedly being planned for later today.
Update: As of 2:00 pm. EST, the CFPB website was offline with a 404 Error message while the CFPB’s X channel displayed a message reading “This account doesn’t exist.”
Photo by Dcwonkywonk / Wikimedia Commons
Fire Musk: he’ll do the same to government as he did to Twitter (destroy), Tesla (ruined), Space X (crashed). One does not destroy an entity to reform it. This is madness….we citizens will be made poorer and the world less safe.
You clearly haven’t been paying attention to what they’re accomplishing.
If you have had people you trusted share your Wi-Fi password with all their friends for a kick-back, (like many of our elected officials have spread our money around to gain votes) the fastest way to figure out who is sucking off the trough is to simply shut it down……
Let them all come back and justify their worth to renew their funding.
We will not like it – but it Has to happen…
Evil man, with evil intentions for the common man. And to the person who thinks these guys are accomplishing something, I say look at what will be the results. Nothing but more turmoil, chaos, expense and results will be that the common person is screwed. These Nazi like guys are not solving real American problems like child hunger, or lack of housing, or better education, or farmers instability, or the supply chain inefficiencies or the military industrial complexes stranglehold on our country, or better infrastructure, or conservation, or clean water, or lead pipes. No they are into greed, corruption, criminal behavior.
Joel, you make great points! The average people (all of us) will never see anything positive for us. The promise of lowering food costs on day one was a lie and there is no fix for housing in the near future but get rid of CFPB, privatize Fannie & Freddie and our tax payer dollars will have to bail them out again when the housing market corrects itself, not because of subprime this go round but because of the over inflated prices that was blamed on covid and is not slowing down post covid. But, this is what the people wanted or at least a majority thinks it’s what they wanted and the party is just getting started so everyone should buckle up because it’s going to be a bumpy ride. The swamp is filling up!