On April 17, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent termination notices to approximately 1,500 of its workers–these mass layoffs represent a nearly 90% cut to the agency. A week prior, a three-judge panel ruled that the layoffs were justified, as long as an assessment was done to determine which employees were unnecessary. The union that represents CFPB employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, rushed to block the terminations, but the ultimate fate of the department is still up in the air.
How could an entire department dedicated to protecting workers be practically shut down overnight?
The CFPB: A front line of defense against corporate greed
The CFPB was founded after the 2008 financial crisis, which was brought on by risky and predatory investments by financial institutions. The CFPB was created as a stopgap measure to prevent this kind of disaster from happening again, by educating consumers on financial matters and enforcing federal laws on banks and big businesses. Its website offers information about mortgages, credit cards, student loans, fraud alerts, retirement, and more. Over the years, the CFPB has pushed banks to reduce or eliminate overdraft fees, ordered Wells Fargo to pay billions of dollars to consumers for “repeatedly misapplying loan payments, wrongfully foreclosing on homes, illegally repossessing vehicles, incorrectly assessing fees and interest and charging surprise overdraft fees”, banned excessive credit card late-payment fees, cracked down on crypto firms for money laundering and fraud, and banned medical debt from appearing on credit reports. As of December of 2024, the CFPB has put more than $21 billion back into the hands of workers, along with providing financial education to over 63 million users.
The Trump administration says that agencies like the CFPB are overstepping their boundaries, wasting taxpayer dollars in the billions and frustrating efforts of capitalists across the U.S. to develop more industry. In 2024, the CFPB received roughly $730 million in federal funding. While Elon Musk and his DOGE army claim cutting agencies that provide some layer of protections for working people are intended to cut government waste, their attacks on agencies like the CFPB show their real goal: to destroy any institution that protects working people from corporate plunder.
Attacks on CFPB are an attack on the working class
These attacks on our public institutions have nothing to do with “efficiency,” they are just one front in the Trump administration’s war on the working class. Workers do not benefit from having their resources taken away, the billionaires do. Workers don’t benefit from funding freezes and department layoffs for the CFPB, but the business owners do. Every single government department that tries to alleviate the suffering of the working class is being targeted for destruction and looting by the billionaire government, with the eventual goal of privatizing these institutions and handing complete control over to the capitalist class.
One of the major functions of the CFPB is overseeing financial transactions and punishing corporations who lost funds, delayed payments, or refused to address issues. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Cashapp, and others who were regulated by the CFPB now have much less scrutiny on how they run their businesses, and therefore, how they treat consumers. These companies have a history of exploiting their users, such as when PayPal illegally signed up members for its online credit service, and was forced to pay back $15 million to consumers.
Others cheering the destruction are Crypto moguls like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, whose company has had almost 8,000 complaints regarding potential scams and inaccessible funds. Elon Musk personally stands to gain from this move, as his social media platform X would have been regulated and supervised by the CFPB as X moves into allowing crypto wallets and digital payments for its users. Crypto CEOs poured millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, knowing that his administration would eliminate much of the federal oversight over their companies.
It is important for us to remember what is at stake when our services and utilities are gutted this way. “Deregulation” has been a popular word for politicians for decades, and for the rich and powerful, having less rules around what can be put in food, what is thrown away into the environment, and what is fair treatment of workers and consumers makes it one of their favorite causes to champion. But it is the working class that suffers. It is because of deregulation that banks caused the worst recession since the great depression in 2008. It was deregulation that poisoned the water of Flint Michigan, and covered East Palestine, Ohio in a carpet of toxic ash. Deregulation sharply exposes the main conflict between workers and the business owners, that for the owners to profit, the workers must suffer.
What is needed now more than ever is a massive working class fight back against the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers and the critical services they provide to hundreds of millions of working and poor people across the country. As the administration takes aim at everything from Medicaid and SNAP to Social Security and the postal service, the public goods that all of us rely on to survive are on the chopping block. But the working class has proven time and time again that when it is organized and ready to fight, the billionaires that want to ruthlessly exploit us are unable to carry out their agenda.