“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down ... We want to put them in trauma.”
Russ Vought’s comments in 2023 to the Center for Renewing America revealed a strategy, intended to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency so it “can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”
Less than two years later, those words could arguably be applied to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which saw Vought installed as acting director. Before his first weekday on the job, Vought ordered CFPB staff to “stand down from performing any work tasks.” Meanwhile, employees based at the CFPB’s Washington headquarters were instructed to work remotely as the building was closed while representatives from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency continued their analysis of the bureau.
By the second weekday of Vought’s tenure at the CFPB, the bureau’s enforcement and supervision chiefs had resigned, its deputy director had been put on administrative leave, it had terminated 70 probationary employees and $100 million in contracts had been canceled.
Here’s a look at Banking Dive’s coverage of changes at the CFPB early in the second Trump era.
