Sen. Warren fights back on Elon Musk's call to 'delete' watchdog agency

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is pushing back against Republican pressure to weaken or even abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency she helped create that has returned billions of dollars to Americans.

The CFPB long has been a prime target of conservatives who often argue its regulations are too expansive, harming businesses and lenders. It faces an uncertain future in a second Trump administration.

A recent social post from Elon Musk, "Delete CFPB," showed the regulator is in the crosshairs of the billionaire businessman co-heading Donald Trump's advisory group on cutting government expenses.

For Warren, who's styling herself as a leader of the Trump resistance, that was a call to arms: "Whenever billionaires are talking about how they think things would work better for ordinary families, hang on to your wallet," she said in an interview with WBUR.

She also seized an opportunity to hold the president-elect accountable. On the campaign trail, Trump made a pledge to working-class voters to temporarily cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

"That would be a real boost for millions of families across this country," Warren said. "If he's true to his word here, and I think we ought to take them at his word, then the CFPB can help him do that."

Warren, in effect, threw the ball back into Trump's court. As he takes office, he will face a choice — whether to make good on promises to help Americans who are struggling financially, or to slash costs Musk-style, even in agencies and programs that help Trump's working-class supporters.

Warren said it would be a mistake to shut down the agency, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks had steered people into sub-prime loans they couldn't afford, causing millions to lose their homes and crashing the economy. According to Warren, the CFPB adds an important line of defense to prevent another crisis, while ending questionable bank policies around credit cards, car loans and payday loans that hurt consumers.

"The CFPB has returned more than $20 billion directly to people who were cheated," she said. "It's the cop on the beat that also has prevented a whole lot of other cheating."

The bureau has investigated hundreds of thousands of complaints. Two years ago, in its biggest action, it slammed Wells Fargo with a record penalty of $3.7 billion for abusive mortgage lending and debt collection practices. And now, killing the agency is part of Project 2025, the platform authored by Trump allies that critics say is the unofficial blueprint for the incoming administration.

"The CFPB has acted arbitrarily and capriciously in so many of their rules that we believe the CFPB should actually be abolished," said Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025 was born.

Griffith said CFPB policies hinder the economy with "layers of regulations" that hurt businesses and consumers. Even though credit card debt has reached record levels, he claims the agency's push to rein in credit card fees would drive down bank profits and limit access to loans for ordinary Americans.

The bureau survived the first Trump administration, despite efforts to weaken it. And earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected a conservative-led attack on the way the agency is funded, through the Federal Reserve. But now, with new conservative clout in Washington, the question is whether lawmakers will find new ways to try to kill the CFPB.

"People love to threaten to destroy things; it's dramatic and gets attention," said Noah Rosenblum, associate professor of law at the NYU School of Law. "But in practice, government agencies are rarely eliminated."

For example, the Department of Education lives on, despite years of threats from conservatives to shut it down, including the latest from the president-elect. Killing an agency requires passing a law, which would require winning approval from both chambers of Congress. That's a tall order; even if all Republicans were on board, they wouldn't have enough votes in the Senate to defeat a Democratic filibuster.

There are other ways to weaken the CFPB — like cutting its funding — but that, too, would require difficult-to-pass legislation. A more likely approach, according to Rosenblum, would be to "appoint people to run the agency who disagree with its mission."

Rosenblum said that was the approach of the first Trump administration in more than one case. Trump tapped Scott Pruitt, a climate-change denier, to run the EPA; and to lead the CFPB, he picked Mick Mulvaney, who ran the agency with "malign neglect,” according to Rosenblum.

But the CFPB is still standing. And according to Warren, it might not behoove Trump politically to destroy it. If Warren is to get her way, Trump would have to reject Musk's call to "delete" the agency, and embrace an unlikely alliance with a progressive from Massachusetts.