On Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025, Donald Trump’s newly appointed head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought announced that he had shuttered the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. He instructed employees by email to not come into the office Monday and to cease work, bringing their efforts to protect consumers from fraud, scams, and financial abuse in the banking industry to a standstill. The announcements follow a Feb. 7 post by Elon Musk on his social media platform X, which stated “CFPB RIP.”

The CFPB was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which the banking industry caused, and is the latest target of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that is working to eliminate oversight by federal agencies. The CFPB regulates mortgages, student loans, credit cards, payday lenders, and other financial instruments that are central to household finances.

“Vought is giving big banks and giant corporations the green light to scam families,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a social media post over the weekend. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has returned over $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street."

DOGE representatives have already accessed internal systems and data at the CFPB. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents nearly 2,000 workers at the CFPB, filed several lawsuits on Sunday in response to Vought and Musk’s actions. The first lawsuit seeks to block the agency’s shutdown so that it can continue its work to protect consumers, while a second suit aims to stop DOGE from accessing its members’ employee records and information, alleging the administration is violating the Privacy Act.

On Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, APWU representatives and staff attended a rally at CFPB headquarters to demonstrate against this hostile takeover of yet another government agency, and to keep the CFPB working for working people, not billionaires.

Effects of Killing off the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Eliminating the CFPB is a key commitment in Project 2025. Since its creation, the big banks and lenders on Wall Street have bristled against increased regulation and oversight brought on by the CFPB. In 2024, opponents of the CFPB brought a lawsuit to the Supreme Court, hoping to overturn the funding mechanism for the Bureau. While their lawsuit failed, the new Trump Administration could present their best chance yet to kill the CFPB.

Currently, the architects of Project 2025 are attempting to abolish the CFPB and in DOGE’s latest actions, hope to overturn many of the regulations that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis. Doing so would make everyone more vulnerable to predatory practices of banks, credit card companies, and other lenders.

There are a number of lawsuits the CFPB brought against some of the country’s biggest financial institutions in 2024, such as Capital One, Walmart, JP Morgan, Bank of America, among others, that are now in doubt, as the new Administration has overhauled the Bureau’s leadership and halted its operations.

Project 2025 also has proposals that would affect the way the Federal Reserve functions. While some of these would reduce compliance issues for banks – a gift to Wall Street – others would make it more difficult and expensive for banks to access funding. In turn, consumer borrowing could be more expensive, despite commitments from the authors to use the tools of government to drive down prices.

In this moment, we must stay united in our fight to defend our rights to be protected from financial abuse and keep building the movement to bring public options like postal banking to the world of finance.