Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, and Adam Schiff, D-CA, demanded that Department of Government Efficiency representatives be removed from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a letter Wednesday to CFPB Acting Director Russ Vought and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“The Trump Administration should be making every effort to strengthen the CFPB – but instead, you are undermining it,” Warren and Schiff wrote.
DOGE representatives infiltrated the agency Feb. 6 with the publicly stated aim of finding areas where the CFPB budget can be cut. But the next day, DOGE’s figurehead, billionaire Elon Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, “CFPB RIP” – indicating perhaps a push to shutter the bureau. In a November post, Musk spotlighted the CFPB as an example of a “duplicative” government agency that he said should be “delete[d].”
Since then, Vought has been named the CFPB’s acting director. He ordered the bureau’s headquarters closed last week, and demanded that employees stop all agency work. Meanwhile, scores of the bureau’s probationary and term employees have been fired, its supervision and enforcement chiefs have resigned, and the agency apparently narrowly avoided a “mass firing” affecting 95% of its workforce.
“Americans deserve a CFPB that will continue to stand up against corporate greed – not an agency shut down by officials looking out for themselves,” Warren and Schiff wrote Wednesday.
The senators argue Musk is operating in self-interest because his X has sought to launch a payments tool this year in a partnership with card network Visa. The CFPB is the only regulator with jurisdiction over the junction of technology companies and finance.
Among recent CFPB layoffs, Warren and Schiff argued, are “roughly 20 people who ‘specialized in understanding Big Tech’s entrance into financial products’ – further inhibiting the agency’s ability to serve consumers and hold X, Visa and other tech firms accountable.”
“Mr. Musk is not only neutralizing the pro-consumer agency that will supervise X’s digital wallet – he is also potentially gaining access to confidential corporate data that could provide X with an unfair advantage over its competitors,” the senators wrote.
Warren and Schiff noted a January penalty the CFPB ordered the fintech Block, which operates Cash App – a presumed competitor to X Money – to pay.
“When the CFPB, like any federal agency, takes an enforcement action against a private company, the company provides sensitive information to the agency,” the senators wrote. “Thanks to his incursion into the CFPB, Mr. Musk and DOGE employees now have access to a trove of proprietary corporate information that he would not have been able to obtain otherwise.”
Warren and Schiff asked Vought and Bessent to detail, by Feb. 25, what enforcement information or proprietary data Musk can access regarding X, Visa or their competitors as a result of DOGE’s efforts at the CFPB. (They asked the same about carmaker Tesla, which Musk also runs.)
The senators also demanded copies of all written communications between DOGE representatives and CFPB officials, and asked what measures have been taken to ensure Musk is not in breach of conflict-of-interest rules.
The White House, of late, has sought to distance Musk from DOGE’s work, going so far as to characterize the CEO as “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.” The White House has also assured that if Musk encounters a conflict of interest, he will recuse himself. However, Warren and Schiff wrote, “it is entirely unclear” how those recusals “have or will work in practice” and the Trump administration “has yet to release a specific plan for how Mr. Musk will avoid conflicts.”
