Washington The appointment of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by President Donald Trump seems to be another attempt to centralize sections of the federal government.
Trump appointed Bessent as the acting head on Friday, the CFPB announced in a statement on Monday. In a letter to the president on Saturday, Rohit Chopra, the agency’s former head, confirmed his departure. He was appointed in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden and has one year left in his five-year tenure.
The Washington Post was the first to report about Bessent taking over the CFPB. Last Monday, Bessent, a former executive at a hedge fund, took the oath of office as Treasury Secretary.
Requests for comment from the CFPB, Treasury Department, and White House were not answered.
This happened overnight after Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur and Trump advisor, said that he and the president were closing the U.S. Agency for International Development. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced his appointment as USAID’s acting director. Although it is not an official organization, Musk has been in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which aims to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.
The Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama in July 2010, created the CFPB. The agency stated that its goal is to “increase accountability in government by consolidating consumer financial protection authorities that had existed across seven different federal agencies into one.”
As of last Thursday, the CFPB said that its efforts have resulted in 195 million consumers being eligible for relief, $5 billion in civil fines, and more than $19 billion in consumer assistance.
Trump “will have a fight on their hands” if they eliminate the agency, according to a statement released Saturday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who led the agency’s development and initially advocated it while she was a law professor.
“If President Trump and Republicans decide to cower to Wall Street billionaires and destroy the agency, they will have a fight on their hands,” she stated. In order to fulfill his campaign pledges to cut expenses for Americans and cap credit card interest rates at 10%, she added, Trump will require a robust CFPB.
On Monday, NBC News contacted Warren for additional comment.
Republican lawmakers and the American Bankers Association praised Trump’s decision to appoint Bessent to lead the CFPB, stating that it has disapproved of many of the agency’s recent actions “that have exceeded its statutory authority, harmed our economy, and imposed significant costs on American consumers.”
ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols stated, “We stand ready to support Secretary Bessent’s efforts to chart a better course for the Bureau and urge him to start repairing the harm caused by these misguided regulatory actions.” “The secret to reducing consumer costs and guaranteeing that America’s banks can fulfill their crucial role in boosting economic growth is appropriately designed regulation.
French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas, who chairs the House Financial Service Committee, praised the action in a statement, claiming that Chopra’s “repeated regulatory overreach wreaked havoc on our financial system to the detriment of the consumers his agency was created to protect.”
Hill stated that he is eager to reform “this unaccountable agency by making the CFPB a bipartisan commission, putting it under the appropriations process, and providing appropriate statutory guardrails.”