I called for the eradication of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before Elon did.
He just made it cool and made it happen. Good for him and the hardworking patriots at DOGE.
This is what I wrote in Messina’s Federal Budget about this wet dream become our burdensome reality of Senator Pocahontas, the Harvard Law Professor who went out of her way to create a totalitarian bureaucracy unaccountable to Congress, with funding on autopilot.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Created by Dodd-Frank, whose main underpinning assumptions are that fifty-eight pre-crisis regulators were unable to prevent a financial crisis, so therefore fifty-nine would clearly make sure everything is fine going forward, the CFPB is rooted in a perhaps admirable idea, but its form and function are ridiculous abuses of non-accountable technocratic absolute power divorced from the rule of law.
It has always reminded me of the office of an “Ombudsman” in New York City government. The Ombudsman exists to look after the interests of the citizens, which is a blatant, in your face admission that the rest of the people in government most certainly do not work in the interests of the citizens. If all civil servants were focused on helping taxpayers in need, then you the taxpayer would just call the relevant office for help. Whether fixing the pothole in front of your hours, or raising an issue about unresponsive DMV staff, you’d just call them. The entire concept of the Ombudsman is that the edifice of government is set against you, so the Ombudsman is the sole official in government fighting for you.
Same thing here. One might wonder what dozens of Federal and State regulatory agencies are doing all day if they are not “protecting consumers.” Quite reasonable, in fact. As it turns out, by design and implementation by a pack of mostly left-leaning life bureaucrats, the CFPB has chosen to wade into issues in banking via a board seat on the FDIC
In a massive middle finger to the Constitution, all of it operations and annual funding are set on autopilot. This invasive abomination gets its money from the Federal Reserve, absent Congressional approval in violation of the clear Constitutional role Congress plays as the holder of the nation’s purse strings.
End it immediately.
Have a gander at their “strategic plan” from a mind-numbing 76-page cure for insomnia they pump out every year.1
This nonsense is what your great-grandchildren are going to pay for when they get to paying off the annual $800,000,000 the Deep State borrowed without anyone asking them to.
The CFPB’s operations are funded principally by transfers made by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board) from the combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System, up to the limits set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act. The CFPB Director requests transfers from the Board in amounts that he or she has determined are reasonably necessary to carry out the CFPB’s mission within the limits set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act. Transfers from the Board were capped at $750.9 million in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 and are capped at $785.4 million in FY 2024 and $823.1 million in FY 2025. Funds transferred from the Federal Reserve System are deposited into the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection Fund (CFPB Fund) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The FY 2024 and FY 2025 budget estimates for the CFPB Fund allow the CFPB to continue to fulfill its statutory purpose, objectives, and functions pursuant to Section 1021 of the Dodd Frank Act. In FY 2023, the CFPB incurred obligations totaling $696.6 million. The budget estimates for FY 2024 and FY 2025 increase to $762.9 million and $810.6 million, respectively. The FY 2024 budget estimate represents a 9.5% increase from FY 2023 levels, while the FY 2025 estimate represents a 6.2% increase from FY 2024.
That is a vast amount of money to fund Liz Warren’s fantasy that all the laws in 50 States and the Federal Leviathan were insufficient to “protect” Americans from accessing financial services, and therefore “required” this pack of nosy busybodies that Congress could not even stop funding for, because in an innovation even in an era of lawless Leftist Administrative State abuses, Liz made sure the cash came from the Federal Reserve, which Congress has no say over.
What have this pack of Marxist-indoctrinated Ivy League parasites been up to with all this cash, you might wonder. Well, here’s what they claim to have done.
Goal 1: Implement and enforce the law to ensure consumers have access to fair, transparent, and competitive markets that serve consumers’ needs and protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices, and from discrimination. Activities related primarily to supervision and enforcement, and issuance and guidance implementation of consumer financial laws, which are included in Goal 1, represent the largest portion of the CFPB’s budget. The CFPB plans to increase staffing and other resources as it continues to increase its capacity to enforce the law to ensure markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive. The CFPB will continue to invest in supervision and enforcement technology tools, as well as its investigation and litigation support to support the CFPB’s supervision and enforcement work. Costs related to supervision and enforcement training and travel are increasing as the CFPB slowly returns to conducting more supervision exams and reviews of depository and non depository institutions on-site.
Do you remember the bad old days before Dodd-Frank and this demonic spawn of Comrade Pocahontas were created, when there were no laws about fraud? The United States of America was renowned throughout the world as having no markets that served consumers’ needs! Nope - none at all! Clearly, the CFPB was no good at creating those conditions, either, because the spent $303 million in 2023 but projected their continued failure to create competitive markets meant they would need $363 million in 2025. How much would it take in one year to make this thing no longer necessary?
Goal 2: Empower consumers to live better financial lives, focusing on traditionally underserved people. Activities related to consumer education, consumer engagement, and handling of consumer complaints in Goal 2 represent around 10% of the CFPB’s overall budget. To support this goal, the CFPB will continue to invest in helping consumers understand and enforce their rights under federal consumer financial law; facilitate the collection, monitoring, and response to consumer complaints; and increase the effectiveness of governing consumer financial markets.
I just can’t. Kids under ten buy games on their mobile phones. US markets are the freest in the world, and information is available to anyone who wants to find it. This ridiculous, patronizing, thinly disguise version of “The White Man’s Burden” is as offensive as it is stupid.
Goal 3: Inform public policy with data-driven analysis on consumers’ experiences with financial institutions, products, and services. Activities related to rulemaking, research, regulatory implementation, and monitoring developments and trends in consumer financial markets in Goal 3 represent around 16% of the CFPB’s overall budget. Cost increases for the Small Business Lending Rule reflect the full-scale design and build-out of a regulatory data collection system for Small Business Lending Rule. The CFPB will continue to invest in further studies and market research focused on underserved consumers. It will also continue to invest resources to the HMDA Platform and National Mortgage Database to ensure consumer financial markets operate in a transparent, efficient, and inclusive manner to facilitate access and innovation.
Here is a self-licking ice cream cone. “Let’s spend $125 million per year collecting data to cherry pick, so we can tell Congress how badly Americans have it when it comes to lack of free choices in the market for goods and services.”
I would like you to bear in mind that Elon Musk hired four coding whiz kids to figure out how badly the US Government was mishandling taxpayer money and they figured it out in under 12 hours starting at 2am on 21 January 2025, a day which should become a National Holiday. Perhaps “We Found Out How Badly the Deep State Has Been Screwing Us Without Accountability Day.”
I digress.
Goal 4: Foster operational excellence and further commitment to workforce equity to advance the CFPB’s mission. Activities in Goal 4 represent 31% of the budget and reflect the CFPB’s commitment to fostering operational excellence and cultivating an equitable, informed, and engaged workforce to advance the CFPPB’s mission.
DEI gibberish which no longer matters, thanks be to God, Elon Musk, Messina’s Federal Budget and President Trump.
Keep those four whiz kids at DOGE in mind when you peruse this table. Four capable young patriots mapped decades of waste and bureaucratic obfuscation in under a day. This is how many people have been sucking cash and benefits from the American taxpayer.
An “FTE” is a full-time employee. Given the “I’m staying home forever because of the Wuhan Fakedemic” nature of the (currently) unionized Federal workforce, I am going to leave to one side the low-hanging fruit available in that phrase.
It takes 1,800 useless parasites to go out into the nation to pester hard working businesses about all of this nonsense.
It should never have been created and every day it continues is a slap in the face to the American taxpayer.
My prediction, since 10/7, has been that half of the daily pro-Hamas protestors will be shown to have been funded by DEI money from NGOs like the CFPB.
The other half of the money will be shown to have come from foreign entities, like Iran and Qatar, through other activist groups.
It feels like there is a neverending river of our tax dollars flowing to all these NGOs, only to lead back to donations to Democrat candidates, who in turn approve budgets that support these NGOs: The circle of grift.
Slush fund for the democrats. Cut the head off the snake 🐍 🔥🔥🔥