When Musk's Team Shows Up at Your Doorstep [View all]

[Celerity]

The upheaval at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offers a glimpse into the playbook that Elon Musk and other Trump allies seem to be writing in real time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/us/politics/elon-musk-doge-cfpb-trump.html

https://archive.ph/1ho8o



At first, things at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seemed eerily calm. The Biden-appointed director of the agency, which was created after the 2009 financial crisis to regulate banks and other lenders, was not immediately fired by President Trump. The lawyers at the agency continued with their business. In late January, they said a remittance company was misleading customers about its fees and ordered it to pay a $2.5 million fine. And then the chaos began.

On the morning of Feb. 1 — a Saturday — the director was dismissed, as my colleague Stacy Cowley, who has followed every twist and turn of this story, reported. By the next Friday, Feb. 7, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a close Trump adviser, was installed as the C.F.P.B.’s acting director. Representatives from the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is led by Elon Musk and is not a formal executive-branch department, arrived and got access to the computer systems.

Musk posted a message on his X account: “CFPB RIP.” Musk’s cost-cutting team has been operating with little transparency. Members don’t announce what they’re doing, who’s doing it or how. So it’s worth understanding what’s happening at the C.F.P.B., both because of the direct impact on the agency’s work and because it’s a glimpse into the playbook that Musk and his team, working with Trump officials like Vought, seem to be writing in real time.



The panic strategy


Russell Vought on Capitol Hill this week. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Last Saturday, Vought ordered the nearly 1,700 people who work at the agency to stop much of their work. The edict prompted widespread fear and deep concern about the agency’s future. People worried that their work phones and computers were being tracked. One employee I spoke with, who asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation, felt panic, and then remembered that Vought had spoken in 2023 of his intent to demoralize workers in the civil service. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought had said.

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