The Trump administration's newly installed acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Russell Vought is closing the agency and has ordered staff to halt all work. WSJ’s Brian Schwartz explores what the agency does and why it’s become the next target for Trump allies like Vought and Elon Musk. Further Listening: - Trump 2.0: Less Foreign Aid, More Tariffs - Inside USAID as Elon Musk and DOGE Ripped It Apart - Trump’s Tariff Whiplash Further Reading: - CFPB to Close Office After Vought Tells Staff to Halt All Supervision - Russell Vought Taking Over as New Acting Head of CFPB Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What changes did Trump make to the CFPB?
Over the weekend, the Trump administration continued taking a buzzsaw to the federal government. After largely dismantling USAID, a $40 billion agency focused on delivering foreign aid, President Trump's sights are now set on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. It's an agency that was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
The CFPB, it's supposed to be this kind of oversight agency over financial institutions across the country. Bank of America, JP Morgan, and you name it. And what they're supposed to be doing is really being a consumer advocacy agency. They're supposed to be monitoring and supervising the financial firms for any sort of scams or anything of the like.
That's our colleague Brian Schwartz. He says Republicans have been railing against the agency for years.
So this is clearly a big target, not just for the Trump administration, but for the banking industry at large.
And over the past few days, the agency ground to a halt. The Trump administration has ordered the Commercial Financial Protection Bureau to stop working effective immediately. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is closing its headquarters this week.
Employees received an email from President Donald Trump's budget chief to stop all work.
There is no word of how long this is going to last outside of this idea that the offices are only supposed to be closed for this week, but I'm highly skeptical of that. They say that it's just for this week. Okay, great. What happens on Friday? We don't know.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, February 11th. Coming up on the show, is this the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
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Chapter 2: What is the role of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
And this idea was that the Office of Management and Budget, as well as the executive authority that goes along with it, really should be route one to the presidency. That the presidency should have the ultimate authority of the OMB, not necessarily entirely Congress. And what does that mean? Like,
The OMB is responsible for various budget matters that really the parts of the power of the purse should go through the executive branch, a.k.a. the OMB, and not Congress. And that's a critical difference there.
And it's similar to what he has said before in other instances where he just thinks that the federal bureaucracy really needs to kind of be broken down and restarted to whatever vision Donald Trump has for it.
And after Trump won the election, he put vote back in charge of the OMB. And not only that, he also became the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's after the break. When Russell Vogt became acting head of the CFPB on Friday, employees there had already received a memo ordering them to pause ongoing investigations, litigation, and the implementation of new rules.
And staffers from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, were inside the agency's internal computer systems. Around the time Vogt took over, Musk posted on X, CFPB RIP, with an emoji of a tombstone.
Once Russell Vogt became the interim chief of the CFPB, he put out a note that went a little bit further than that and called for CFPB officials to pause on their supervisory efforts. In other words, stop supervising the financial firms that you're supposed to be supervising. Do not do your work. Stop all work. Stop doing your job. That's pretty wild, right?
I mean, you get an email from somebody that just says, press pause on what you're doing and don't move. Clear warning signs that something is up at that agency, that they are clearly trying to do something to it. It's just a matter of what and when at this point.
And then on Sunday, employees got another memo.
So the third memo was calling on staff not to come into the office. It said, do not come to the D.C. office because we have closed the office at least temporarily for this week.
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