Elon Musk is wrong to call the CFPB a “duplicative regulatory agency” and for it to be “deleted”

Earlier today, Elon Musk posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the CFPB should be deleted as a duplicative regulatory agency. I’m not sure why Musk considers the CFPB duplicative or what he thinks it is duplicative of (or if he himself knows), but it is simply wrong to call the CPB duplicative. Some history tells us why. To take only one example: back in 1994, Congress gave the Federal Reserve the power to prevent precisely the kind of mortgage lending that led to 2008’s Great Recession. The Fed–which was far more concerned with matters other than protecting consumers–failed to act, lenders made bad mortgages, and the economy crashed. Congress responded by taking the power the Fed failed to use (until 2008, when it was far too late), creating the CFPB, and giving the power to prevent bad mortgages to the CFPB–which the CFPB has done. That history alone demonstrates that the CFPB is not duplicative because it does something other financial agencies don’t: protect consumers. And that doesn’t even take into account the more than $20 billion the CFPB has returned to consumers, the rules it has adopted to protect consumers, or the many other things it does to protect consumers. The richest man in the world may not need much consumer financial protection but the rest of us do. If anything needs to be deleted, it’s Musk’s tweet.