One of the best things President-elect Trump has initiated is the Department of Government Efficiency – the DOGE. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are preparing to let the DOGE off the leash, and if a recent X post from Elon is any indication, the DOGE may be taking a bite out of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB.)
That seems a good idea; the federal government is massively feather-bedded, and we got along just fine without the CFPB until 2011; it seems we could get along without it again. And if anyone asks why, I could provide 36 trillion reasons. In other words, we’re broke, we’re in a deep, deep financial hole, and for crying out loud, we need to stop digging.
Tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen recently went on Joe Rogan’s show to talk about the CFPB:
At the beginning of the first video clip, Andreesen points out that there is no constitutional authorization for the CFPB, not that the Constitution has ever prevented Senator Warren from trying one of her big-government schemes:
So like, for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control. It’s an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants. If you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet there it is.
Andreesen goes on to give examples:
Like they did to Kanye, my partner Ben’s father has been debanked. (Really?) We had an employee. (For what?) For having the wrong politics, for saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations… Okay, here’s a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP. If you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank. (What?) You’re not allowed to have them.
And:
Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account. You can’t do credit card transactions. By the way, you can’t- (How is that legal?) Well, exactly. This is the thing. Then you go on this is the thing. And then you go on this thing of like, well, there’s no… This is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is there’s a constitutional amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech, but there’s no constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you. If they can’t do the one thing, then they do the other thing. Then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. Then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to. But the government gets to say, We didn’t do.
That’s the danger of government overreach. The left, like Senator Warren, likes to talk about Donald Trump wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” calling him a “fascist,” and so forth – but this is using the power of government, the power to coerce, to squash political dissent. It’s anathema to everything America stands for.
See Related: Will Trump Shake Up the CFPB?
Rogue Agency: GOP Lawmakers Scrutinize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Hits Ohio Bank With… Protection Racket?
So, yes, Elon and Vivek should make the CFPB one of their targets for the DOGE. It’s an organization that is unconstitutional; it has a track record of punishing “incorrect” opinions with the full force of banking regulation, in effect looking at conservative entrepreneurs and telling them, “Nice little business you have there – it would be a shame if anything… happened to it.”
Like being debanked.
The CFPB can go. It’s unconstitutional. We got along fine without it until 2011. This is precisely the kind of thing we need the DOGE to do. Let the DOGE off the leash.
