New legislation places tyrannical financial agency on the chopping block

Legislation introduced in both houses of Congress aims to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent agency within the federal government that controls financial institutions.

The CFPB, founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is paid directly by the Federal Reserve and sets its own budget. While it claims to safeguard the interests of consumers, the bureau has been widely criticized for exercising totalitarian control over the banking industry by stifling competition and policing non-financial businesses.

Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Defund the CFPB Act, which would prohibit the Federal Reserve from funding the bureau.

“The CFPB is an unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agency that has imposed burdensome and harmful regulations on American businesses, banks, and credit unions,” said Cruz in a statement. “It is an unchecked Obama-era executive arm and the Federal Reserve should not be transferring funds to it. Enacting this legislation would save American taxpayers billions of dollars and I call on the Senate to expeditiously take it up and pass it.”

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) introduced the act in the House of Representatives.

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk has called to “delete the CFPB.” President Donald Trump last month fired CFPB Director Rohit Chopra but has so far not committed to eliminating the agency.

‘This is where a lot of the debanking comes from’

One of the tactics CFPB uses to control industries is by debanking certain businesses. Crypto companies, for example, find it difficult to obtain bank accounts at major banks because of CFPB rules. Billionaire startup investor Marc Andreessen explained this to podcaster Joe Rogan in December.

“We have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control,” said Andreessen. “And it’s an independent agency that gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet there it is.”

Andreessen said the CFPB acts on Sen. Warren’s whim and is able to “terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks . . . Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.”

“This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies,” he continued. “So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.”

The investor explained that agencies like the CFPB allow the federal government to skirt the Constitution:

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, right? And so they, if they can’t do the one thing, they do the other thing, and then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to.

But the government gets to say we didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, because they’re a private company. And so it’s this it’s this sleight of hand that happens it — basically it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran. Kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they’re trying to protect the big banks.

I’m not debanking, you’re debanking

Warren, however, claims the CFPB is trying to stop debanking and has appealed to President Trump to save her agency.

“I know that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a favorite whipping boy of the Republicans on this committee, but the CFPB is the main agency in our government that is actively working to stop unfair debanking. Let me say that again, the CFPB is the one agency that is actively working to stop unfair debanking,” Warren said Wednesday. “Right now, the agency has five different rules, either in place or in progress, that would help prevent debanking by addressing some of the root causes, from overdraft fee practices to religious discrimination, and the CFPB is working to hold banks accountable when they close law-abiding citizens and businesses accounts for no good reason.

“I sent a letter to President Trump today that walks through the CFPB’s work . . . I said that the CFPB is the one agency fighting back against debanking, but that may be at risk. Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary and acting CFPB Director Scott Bessent halted all CFPB rule-making enforcement, investigations and litigation against financial institutions that are breaking the law, including the banks that are wrongfully debanking their customers. The freeze Secretary Bessent put on the CFPB means more Americans across this country will be unfairly debanked, and they will lose the one agency that is working to help them.”

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