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‘Delete CFPB’: Musk calls for elimination of consumer bureau

Republicans and the financial industry have long targeted the CFPB for what they consider its overly aggressive regulation.

Lead Art: Tesla chief Elon Musk, who's leading a review of government agencies and spending, said he thought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be shut down. | Evan Vucci/AP

Lead Art: Tesla chief Elon Musk, who's leading a review of government agencies and spending, said he thought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be shut down. | Evan Vucci/AP

Elon Musk said Wednesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be abolished, calling for the elimination of an agency that would potentially regulate the future payments business of the Musk-owned X platform.

“Delete CFPB,” Musk, who is leading an effort on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump to shrink the size of the federal government, wrote in a post on X. “There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

Trump on the campaign trail called for easing regulation of the financial industry generally but didn’t explicitly call for the elimination of the CFPB, which Republicans have railed against for years. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, which Trump sought to distance himself from during the campaign, recommended the agency be shut down.

Trump is widely expected to rein in the Biden-era CFPB’s regulatory agenda and ease enforcement against companies, as he did during his first term in office. But eliminating the agency entirely, as Musk appears to be proposing, would require an act of Congress.

Republicans and the financial industry have long targeted the CFPB for what they consider its overly aggressive regulation, though efforts to take down the agency in Congress and in the courts have largely been unsuccessful. GOP lawmakers, even under Republican control, have lacked the votes to eliminate or defund the CFPB. And more recently the Supreme Court earlier this year upheld the agency’s funding structure as constitutional.

Musk’s statement comes less than a week after the CFPB finalized a regulation that would expand its oversight of big tech companies that offer payment and digital wallet apps. That would potentially include X, which has explored ways to enter the payments business.

Musk said when he purchased X, previously known as Twitter, that he wanted to transform the site into an “everything app” that included the ability of users to store money and send payments. Since then, X Payments has obtained licenses to transmit payments from dozens of state regulators.

The CFPB declined to comment. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive watchdog group, criticized Musk’s call to eliminate the CFPB as “intolerable corruption.”

“Asking the world’s richest person, with a direct interest in a wide range of business lines, to run a project to review the federal government’s overall operations is absurd and fundamentally corrupt — and this issue highlights exactly why,” Weissman said in a statement.

Musk’s post came in response to a video clip of the prominent investor Marc Andreessen telling podcaster Joe Rogan that he believes that the CFPB was “terrorizing” tech firms and start-ups that want to compete with big banks.

Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, invested in a company, LendUp Loans that was shut down by the CFPB over allegations of illegal marketing and fair lending violations. At the time, the CFPB noted that the company, which pitched itself as a payday lender alternative, had been backed by Andreessen’s firm, among other prominent venture capitalists.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that Andreessen is among the Silicon Valley moguls who have been involved in the planning for the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump advisory panel helmed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Author: Editors Desk, Michael Stratford

Source: Politico

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