Today, I’m talking to Rohit Chopra. He was the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began trying to dismantle the agency.
The CFPB has been around for just under 15 years now. Congress created the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from various kinds of lending and credit schemes that led to that crash.
Broadly speaking, the CFPB has been pretty popular! This is the agency that keeps consumers safe from predatory lending practices, limits credit cards fees, and investigates various kinds of financial fraud. So effectively shutting it down kicked off a number of controversies, not least of which is: Do Trump and Musk even have the power to do this? After all, the CFPB was created by Congress with a law, and the US Constitution says the president is supposed to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed and not be reinterpreted by an unelected billionaire who is deep into crypto. In fact, I don’t think that came up with the founders at all, though it’s been a minute since I watched Hamilton.
This all led me to ask Chopra several times who actually made the decision to fire him, who is currently responsible for the various policies of our government, and whether any of those things add up to a clear plan for which someone can actually be held accountable.
I ask questions like this on Decoder all the time, and there are usually answers, even from some of the most powerful executives in the world. In fact, especially from some of the most powerful executives in the world. But here, well, you’re just going to hear Chopra say, over and over again, that he doesn’t know. Sincerely, I don’t think he knows — and that should probably be as worrying as anything.
He and I also talked about the clash between the two main factions of the Trump coalition. On one hand, there are the Musk tech libertarians, and then there’s the more populist MAGA wing. Right now, these two factions are having a big fight over tariffs (and it’s still hard to tell what’s going on there), and they seem poised to be potentially even more at odds as Trump reshapes more of the government.
The CPFB sits right in the middle of that fight; it’s a lot easier for Musk to turn X into an everything app crossed with a crypto payments platform if there’s no regulator on the beat. But the populist wing of the party isn’t exactly in love with big banks and Big Tech gaining even more power. I have no idea how that will play out, so I was curious to see if Chopra had any insight — and what he was most worried about happening without an agency like the CFPB standing guard.
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