Loading ...DOGE-Backed Halt at CFPB Comes Amid Musk’s Plans for ‘X’ Digital Wallet
Government-efficiency team’s initial ‘read-only’ access expanded quickly to encompass closely guarded data, internal emails say.
director of the financial-enforcement agency.
Vought is an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s influential and controversial government-overhaul plan called Project 2025, which appears to have guided DOGE’s attempts to dismantle portions of the federal bureaucracy. Earlier this month, the team played a key role in the administration’s effort to shut down the US Agency for International Development, another longstanding conservative bête noire.
Bloomberg News sought comment from Musk, Vought, the DOGE team members and the White House. None responded.
Project 2025 calls for abolishing the CFPB, which Congress created as a consumer watchdog in the wake of the financial crisis that precipitated the Great Recession. On Saturday night, Vought sent an email instructing its employees to stop “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” and he announced that he would decline additional funding for the bureau, saying its current account balance of $711.6 million is “excessive.” Those steps came one day after Musk posted the message “CFPB RIP” next to a tombstone emoji on his personal X account.
The CFPB is mandated to perform direct supervision on large banks and other companies it oversees. Supervision in the financial regulatory world means that examiners look under the hood at a company’s operations.
CFPB examiners have access to banks with $10 billion or more in assets, but they also oversee debt collectors, payday and other online lenders, consumer credit reporting companies, some fintechs and payments processors, and a host of other companies that banking regulators don’t monitor. The agency’s former director told a congressional panel last year that it had returned $20.7 billion to consumers since its inception.
The confidential supervisory information CFPB examiners collect is stored on agency laptops and in its internal Supervision Examination System, a Salesforce platform. That data — including customer information and complaints; new products under development but not yet released to the public; and financial information — is valuable and closely guarded, the five people said.
While there’s no evidence that DOGE staffers have begun studying any of the examination and enforcement records, employees of the financial-oversight agency questioned the appropriateness of giving the government-efficiency initiative the ability to access those records.
Just nine days before his DOGE team visited CFPB, Musk’s X — the former Twitter — announced that it had struck a deal with Visa to process peer-to-peer payments. Musk has publicly mused about expanding into payment-services since he first took control of X in 2022. Entering that business could bring CFPB oversight under rules the agency finalized in November. The records DOGE can now access would include sensitive and potentially competitive information.
A few hours later, CFPB’s X account was deleted, and the home page of the agency’s website was partially dismantled. Visitors to the website now see a “404 page not found” message when visiting the home page, although links to most pages are still accessible.
CFPB employees who read the memorandum of understanding started backchannel discussions about it and raised red flags, according to the five people familiar with the matter. They asked why DOGE would need to access the human resources, finance and procurement data if its goal was to modernize the agency’s software, the people said.
One employee sent an email to CFPB Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez and his aides, asking them to “pause and ensure that the systems that are being provided” to the DOGE team “are consistent with the law.” The email expressed concern about potential “actions that may accidentally lead to data breaches, unintended access and other risks to the American public.”
It’s unclear whether the employee received a response. Martinez didn’t respond to a request for comment Sunday.
The DOGE team were given “senior advisor” titles at the agency and worked from a conference room in the basement of CFPB’s headquarters. The CFPB’s union attempted to greet them at the door, but the DOGE teams were standoffish and didn’t talk to anyone, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The DOGE employees largely stayed in the basement; one was spotted emerging to pick up a Chipotle order for lunch in the CFPB lobby.
By Saturday afternoon, according to five people familiar with the matter, the DOGE team’s administrative access had expanded, giving users the ability to choose which of the agency’s internal systems they can explore.
That night, Vought began to lay the groundwork for overhauling and at least temporarily shutting down the CFPB. He sent an email to all the agency’s employees under the subject line, “Directives on Bureau Activities,” which prohibited them from issuing any public communications, continuing pending investigations or launching new probes. It also ended all supervision and examinations.
On Sunday afternoon, Martinez, the chief operating officer, sent an email to CFPB staff informing them that the agency’s headquarters will be closed this week and they should work remotely. Employees who were in the office were ordered to vacate the building by the agency’s director of security