Elon Musk, who has become a confidant of president-elect Donald Trump, has called for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be dismantled. (Image generated by AI in Midjourney)Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of companies including Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has called for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to be dismantled ahead of his expected role scrutinizing government spending in the incoming Trump administration. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
The so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” referred to under the acronym “DOGE,” will be led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramswamy and will be charged with examining how and where the federal government is directing federal spending.
Such a role in the impending transition of power gives more weight to the statement about the CFPB, a longstanding target of criticism and dismantling efforts by Republican-aligned interest groups and politicians.
“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk wrote on the social media platform he owns early Wednesday morning.
The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis and marked some of the first high-level government interaction of Elizabeth Warren, who at the time was serving as an influential professor at Harvard Law School and who was tapped by President Barack Obama to assist in formulating the agency after it was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Warren is now a U.S. senator for the state of Massachusetts, and has been a staunch supporter of the Bureau in her position on the influential Senate Banking Committee.
But since it came online in 2011, the agency has been a consistent target of severe criticism and legal cases by Republican lawmakers and has been a regular fixture on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court as corporate interests have attempted to invalidate or otherwise dismantle the CFPB.
Despite these efforts, the Court has sided with the Bureau on key cases that have questioned its constitutionality, including the most recent case that attempted to find the Bureau’s funding source unconstitutional earlier this year. The Court disagreed.
But prior to the expiration of Donald Trump’s first term, the Court did imbue the president with the power to hire and fire the CFPB director, a role that was previously insulated from this authority prior to the 2020 decision.
During the first Trump administration, the agency was led by at least one outright former Republican congressman and Bureau critic, Mick Mulvaney, before Kathleen Kraninger was appointed and confirmed as the agency’s full-time director. During her leadership tenure, Kraninger de-emphasized enforcement, leading some critics to argue the agency had lost its “teeth.”
But now that Donald Trump is preparing for the impending transition of power, there could be a new opportunity to dismantle or undercut the Bureau’s authority.
“We have a popular vote mandate, both chambers of Congress, and 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. It’s now or never to structurally reform the federal government,” Ramswamy wrote in his own X post on Wednesday morning.
It was retweeted by Musk, who added, “It’s this time or never.”
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