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Not everyone in the Trump orbit is apparently happy with Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) method of picking apart the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Some Trump aides and advisers fear that DOGE is “moving too fast and breaking too many things,” Bloomberg reported Saturday.
“Trump allies including Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the CFPB, were seen as concerned that DOGE’s lack of discipline could undermine efforts to neuter the agency, according to three people briefed on the situation who weren’t authorized to speak publicly,” Bloomberg reported. “The worry is that the Musk team’s haphazard actions could be challenged in court — and allow a muscular CFPB to live on.”
A spokesperson for Vought denied any tensions exist, telling Bloomberg that the “story is false and another ax-to-grind story against DOGE.”
Vought, a Project 2025 architect who has advocated for eliminating the CFPB, virtually shut down the agency immediately after assuming power. He ordered staff to cease supervisory and regulatory work. Vought also forbade agency lawyers from continuing active litigation and any communications among staff.
Bloomberg reported that Musks’s team had fired roughly 200 of the agency’s 1,700 employees, and others cannot work unless cleared by a White House lawyer. Sources told the publication that DOGE officials—who are working out of the basement—didn’t appear to even understand what the agency did.
The ongoing DOGE probe of CFPB functions comes as Mark Calabria, the former head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), joins in an interim capacity until the confirmation of Jonathan McKernan as permanent director. The Washington Post reported that he will be tasked with helping bring independent agencies under the control of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
In July, he told HousingWire he doesn’t expect to see the agency “deleted.”
“I don’t think the CFPB is going away — as much as that would be nice. But I do think you are going to see a difference in the stance, which will matter in the mortgage industry, in terms of enforcement and obligations. The Republicans’ approach to the CFPB is to say that there are wrongdoers; we will go after the bad guys. This [Biden] administration says the same thing, and that’s where the overlap is. The difference is this [Biden] administration also has the view that we’re going to use the CFPB to pick winners and losers to redistribute to our friends and engage in a lot of social engineering. And that’s a much different approach from just going after the bad guys,” Calabria said.
On Thursday, a federal judge allowed the Trump administration to fire federal employees, including at the CFPB and Department of Veterans Affairs, punting the case to the Federal Labor Relations Authority instead.
