First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.
Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”
So far, so good.
Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.
Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?
The mission itself is bad.
This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts.
Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.
RedState hopes the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.
Yes, end it: as critics have long argued. Why does this agency exist except to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise? One of many federal agencies that should expire.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Previously on the CFPB:
Give Them Credit — February 2, 2014
Invulnerable Government — November 28, 2017
Peel Back the Onion — November 30, 2017
Protector Protection — January 6, 2020
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3 replies on “Killing a Bureau”
Some large share of the public will never learn what the CFPB has been doing. That share will include both people who never think that, perhaps, the mainstream of the media is not keeping them informed, and a much larger share who suspect that they are being kept ignorant, but feign a belief that they have no such suspicions.
Those in the latter group are more likely later to point to the closure of the CFPB as if the closure was to remove protections of consumers from wicked financial intermediaries.
Democratic Representative Ayanna Soyini Pressley on the closure of the CFPB
No federal agency expires without first giving birth to its successor. The only sign of eternal life is a government program.