In 2017, then-President Donald Trump appointed White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As a Republican member of Congress, Mulvaney had previously called the CFPB “a joke… in a sick, sad kind of way.”
So it was a bit like déjà vu when Elon Musk, Trump’s new presidential adviser, tweeted in early November “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” The CFPB is also named in the Heritage Foundation’s policy document Project 2025, which calls it “a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency.”
For those invested in the work of the agency – protecting consumers from abuses in financial products and services – the recent offensives are concerning. But the CFPB, which was developed after the 2008 financial crisis and modeled on a proposal from Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has evolved into less of a political football than it was in 2017.
Now, observers say, the response to Musk and others might be, “Delete at your own risk.”
“If you take objective evidence, just the dollars returned to people, the CFPB is a resounding success,” said Pamela Foohey, the Allen Post Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. “Year after year after year, through different administrations. And it’s really hard to deny that.”
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How does the CFPB help consumers?
The CFPB’s work spans the various ways…