{"id":2998,"date":"2024-11-27T21:36:37","date_gmt":"2024-11-27T21:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/delete-cfpb-musk-calls-for-elimination-of-consumer-bureau\/"},"modified":"2024-11-27T21:36:37","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T21:36:37","slug":"delete-cfpb-musk-calls-for-elimination-of-consumer-bureau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/delete-cfpb-musk-calls-for-elimination-of-consumer-bureau\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Delete CFPB\u2019: Musk calls for elimination of consumer bureau"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDelete CFPB,\u201d 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<\/a>. \u201cThere are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump on the campaign trail called for easing regulation of the financial industry generally but didn\u2019t explicitly call for the elimination of the CFPB, which Republicans have railed against for years. The Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025 blueprint, which Trump sought to distance himself from during the campaign, recommended the agency be shut down.<\/p>\n

Trump is widely expected to rein in the Biden-era CFPB\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> upheld the agency\u2019s funding structure as constitutional.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Musk said when he purchased X, previously known as Twitter, that he wanted to transform the site into an \u201ceverything app\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The CFPB declined to comment. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive watchdog group, criticized Musk\u2019s call to eliminate the CFPB as \u201cintolerable corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAsking the world\u2019s richest person, with a direct interest in a wide range of business lines, to run a project to review the federal government\u2019s overall operations is absurd and fundamentally corrupt \u2014 and this issue highlights exactly why,\u201d Weissman said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s 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 \u201cterrorizing\u201d tech firms and start-ups that want to compete with big banks.<\/p>\n

Andreessen\u2019s 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<\/a>, which pitched itself as a payday lender alternative, had been backed by Andreessen\u2019s firm, among other prominent venture capitalists.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u201cDelete CFPB,\u201d Musk, who is leading an effort on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump to shrink the size of the federal government, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}