MAGA vowed to 'fight debanking' conservatives — only to gut consumer protection agency doing just that

Although President Donald Trump was critical of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) during his first administration, Trump and his allies are attacking it more aggressively in his second term.

The Hill's Julia Shapero reports that the second Trump Administration is "moving rapidly to gut" the CFPB by "halting the agency's work, cutting off its funding and shutting down its headquarters." And a CPFB employee, interviewed on condition of anonymity and referencing the fate of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), told The Hill, "I think everyone assumes this is the USAID playbook, and I think everyone's operating off of the assumption that we're about to get annihilated, the way that they were annihilated."

The CFPB was established during former President Barack Obama's first term in response to the Great Recession.

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Journalist Glenn Greenwald is arguing that it's a total contradiction for Trump to preach "economic populism" on one hand and attack the CFPB on the other.

In a Tuesday, February 11 post on X, formerly Twitter, Greenwald wrote, "Closing CFPB is the opposite of the economic populism claimed by MAGA. It was one of the only reforms after the 2008 financial crisis. Little else protects consumers against the tyranny of large banks. And CFPB was implementing rules to bar de-banking on political grounds."

On "System Update," which he hosts, Greenwald discussed the Trump Administration's anti-CFPB agenda with Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project.

System Update tweeted, "Republicans have railed against companies debanking conservatives, but now the party is trying to gut the same agency that has worked to fight debanking under the Biden administration."

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Greenwald noted that after the economic crash of September 2008, "populists" on both the left and the right were outraged by the bank bailouts — from the progressive Occupy Wall Street to the right-wing Tea Party. And the creation of the CFPB, Greenwald recalled, was a direct result of the financial crisis of the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Greenwald told Stoller, "There was a perception, across the spectrum — just from ordinary Americans — that we had gotten to a point in our country where massive financial institutions, massive corporations, had centralized so much power because of their control over Washington that ordinary Americans just had no chance anymore, no voice any longer. And this agency, which is quite modest in terms of its budget and even in terms of its power, seems like it's the kind of thing that would appeal to that sentiment — which I think has even grown. This kind of left-right sentiment against unrestrained corporate power at the expense of ordinary Americans."

When Greenwald asked Stoller why billionaire Tesla/SpaceX/X.com CEO Elon Musk — who now heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — is attacking the CFPB, Stoller responded, "Conservatives are rethinking their approach to politics, to economics. I mean, that's why Trump didn't come out of the Republican establishment. And that rethinking takes time; that's sort of the charitable way to put it…. That rethinking just hasn't happened sufficiently."

Stoller added, however, that many MAGA Republicans think that "conservatives are losing their bank accounts" because "regulators are telling bankers" not to "give bank accounts to conservatives." And they are blaming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (R-Massachusetts), who played a key role in CFPB's creation, for that.

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