And you thought the Thanksgiving holiday weekend was going to be a slow news day … Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tasked by President-elect Trump with identifying ways to reduce government spending, suggested in a post on his social media platform on Wednesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau be eliminated because it is a “duplicative regulatory” agency.
Musk, who along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been tapped to lead the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which operates outside the federal government, but whose mission is to identify ways to reduce government spending. His post on Wednesday came in response to a video from investor Marc Andreesen, who told podcaster Joe Rogan that the CFPB was “terrorizing” tech firms.
Former CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney came out in support of Musk’s idea, while consumer advocates were quick to denounce it.
Mulvaney said that he investigated whether he had the power to shutter the Bureau while he was running it but lawyers he had hired to investigate the idea told him he couldn’t.
“Elon’s comments are right on point,” Mulvaney said, according to a published report. The CFPB is “a duplicative layer of additional regulatory oversight into the consumer financial protection relationship.”
President-elect Trump likely would need help from Congress if he opts to try and shutter the CFPB, but can remove “all of its teeth” without needing Congressional approval, according to a published report. The CFPB was created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to police and regulate consumer financial products following the 2008 financial crisis and only Congress has the power to eliminate it.
“The richest man in the world may not need much consumer financial protection but the rest of us do,” wrote Jeff Sovern, a consumer protection law professor at the University of Maryland. “If anything needs to be deleted, it’s Musk’s tweet.”
Project 2025, which was written by The Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a Trump second term, recommended closing the Bureau, and Musk may have some bias in wanting to see the agency done away with, given its attempts to regulate big tech companies.
