"They disagree that we are making things better for Americans, so they’re trying to end it.”

A break from Game File’s usual coverage: A look at a U.S. regulatory agency I recently covered that’s now facing a dismantling by Elon Musk and the Trump administration.

The CFPB’s website, which still mostly works, has displayed a large error message, since late last week. Screenshot: Game File

Three weeks ago—a political lifetime ago—Game File brought readers a report about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its burgeoning interest in granting players of some video games the kind of anti-fraud protections Americans have on their debit cards.

The bureau was created in 2010 in the wake of an American financial crisis that had been fueled by predatory loans, and it typically scrutinizes banks, mortgage lenders, auto loan providers and the like. But in 2024 it said it was looking at the video game industry, after it noticed some game companies were “drifting into banking,” CFPB officials told Game File at the time.

Some video game companies, such as those that allow gamers to buy virtual currency and later cash it out, might be subject to the CFPB’s oversight, the bureau had suggested over the past year. It was considering whether existing consumer protection law involving electronic funds—laws that typically involve ensuring people won’t, say, lose money when someone steals and uses their ATM card—could also apply to getting scammed out of virtual currency. (Press coverage in January commonly cited Roblox as a likely company that’d come under CFPB’s oversight, but the bureau had avoided publicly naming any gaming companies).

In January, the CFPB kicked off a process for public feedback that was set to run through the end of March before the bureau might lock in an expanded view of its enforcement powers.

That work and the rest of the CFPB’s portfolio appears to be frozen now, as the Trump administration and workers at the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency appear to be targeting the bureau for, at best, a significant down-sizing, and, at worst, its destruction.

“CFPB, RIP,” Musk tweeted on Friday, February 7, along with an emoji of a gravestone.

February has been tumultuous for workers at the CFPB. Some had expected antipathy from an administration that had curtailed the bureau’s work the last time around, though workers thought they still might get a shot at accomplishing the bureau’s goals scrutinizing banks and other lenders.

“I was hoping to continue to do the work that I was doing, because I had plenty of reason to believe that there was still a lot of important work for the American people that I could be doing under the administration,” a current CFPB employee told me earlier this week, under the condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

But the chances of doing any work at CFPB have winnowed over the course of the month, following a sequence of events that has steadily worsened for the bureau.

At the start of February, Trump fired the CFBP’s director. And, on February 3, then-acting director, newly appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent emailed employees to tell them their work was frozen.

Not all of this was irregular nor cause for panic, the CFPB source said.

“There were some expectations that this was somewhat normal,” they said, acknowledging that, during a change in presidential administrations, a new director might review the work underway and decide what to continue and what to suspend. That process, they said, can take weeks or months.

And Tweets like Musk’s, the CFPB official said, weren’t necessarily a sign of substantive action.

But Musk and his DOGE team had already put another federal agency, USAID, through the proverbial “wood chipper” and worries mounted among CFPB workers, the official said. “There were some folks concerned that we were next.”

They were right.

On Thursday, February 6, it was reported that the CFPB’s general counsel was resigning. That, the source said, “was ominous.”

That evening, new people showed up at the CFPB’s offices—including at least one member of Musk’s DOGE team, according to a recently filed lawsuit by the bureau’s union—and were granted access to the CFPB’s building and systems.

On Saturday, February 8, the CFPB’s next acting director, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, emailed the bureau’s employees to cease “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” according to the the New York Times. In posts on Twitter/X, Vought assailed the CFPB’s “unaccountability,” called the group he was now overseeing “woke & weaponized” and said he was declining to obtain new funding for the bureau.

That same day, CFPB workers protested outside their HQ in Washington, D.C.

On Sunday, the union representing CFPB workers filed two lawsuits, alleging that DOGE’s access to bureau records was a violation of the Privacy Act and that Vought’s funding and work freezes were illegal, according to a Fox Business report. From one of the lawsuits:

Defendant Vought’s decision to prevent the CFPB from drawing down more funding and ordering the CFPB’s workforce to cease all supervision and examination activity reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’s decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.

Defendant Vought’s actions thus violate separation of powers principles because they undermine Congress’s authority to set and fund the missions of the CFPB.

That same day, CFPB workers received an email telling them the office would be closed through the week. “The email about the office being closed was definitely irregular,” the CFPB official said. “There was no context as to why. The timing was interesting. And I’ve never seen anything like it.”

On Monday, Vought emailed CFPB staff to tell them to cease agency-related work while the building was closed.

And on Tuesday night, probationary workers at CFPB, those in their first year of work, received an email informing them they’d been fired. As reported by Wired, the emails seemed to be the product of a failed mail merge, using placeholder terms such as “[EmployeeFirst Name] [EmployeeLastName] [JobTitle]” instead of actually naming the recipients.

A targeted agency

“The work that DOGE is doing is brazen and not tethered to reality,” the anonymous CFPB official told Game File. “They seem to just not like the regulation we work on. They disagree that we are making things better for Americans, so they’re trying to end it.”

The CFPB source, and others, have noted Musk’s business incentives to defang a regulator whose mandate would include Tesla, which gives out auto loans, and X, which recently announced plans for a digital wallet payments system with Visa. “I’m sure that Musk would like one less regulator to have to worry about in trying to make a foray into that market.” they said.

Musk has said that he will recuse himself of conflicts of interest and that DOGE’s actions are sufficiently transparent because they are chronicled on X. Trump said yesterday that he trusted Musk’s approach.

Critics of the CFPB have said it is a redundant organization that overlaps with the enforcement powers of the Federal Trade Commission, among others, and that it is needlessly expansionist with its mandate.

“There are absolutely conversations that should be had about the redundancies that exist in government and in regulation,” the CFPB worker told Game File. “However, if you are starting from the position of truly wanting to regulate in a lean and effective manner, the CFPB is the last place you’re going to go to make some changes and cuts.”

They argue that the CFPB, being a newer agency, is leaner and inherently less afflicted by the bloat that comes with longer-lasting bureaucracies.

Supporters also argue that the bureau is efficient because it is not funded by taxpayer dollars but instead through money drafted from the Federal Reserve, that is then paid for by its enforcement actions. Those supporters say the agency’s value can be measured in the money it gets back from banks and other lenders and in the money its rule-making saves Americans. The CFPB’s latest financial report for its 2023-2024 fiscal year indicates its enforcement actions resulted in $2,048,801,727 in victims’ compensation, including $12 million from frequent target Bank of America over false mortgage data and $20 million from TD Bank over issuing faulty credit reports. As or money saved, the agency said in December, for example, that it expected the closing of a loophole over banks’ overdraft fees to save Americans $5 billion annually.

Game File’s CFPB source lamented that the demise of the CFPB could deprive Americans of its complaint system, which is plugged into the companies the bureau oversees to ensure they respond to consumer complaints (Some gaming companies would also be onboarded onto the complaint system, should the bureau expand its purview to that industry, officials told Game File last month.)

“When you submit a complaint to the CFPB, the companies and banks that are under our purview are legally required to respond to you or tell us why they are not responding to you. So that's a really democratic and powerful tool and resource that I don’t think most Americans realize that they have access to. And certainly I don’t think they appreciate the gravity of that going away.”

It’s unclear what exactly will happen next to the CFPB. The bureau’s operations were curtailed under the prior Trump administration, then encouraged under Biden’s. They now face what has rhetorically been a more existential threat.

“I know that a lot of people are working really hard right now to fight for the CFPB,” the anonymous official told Game File. “That battle is going to be fought in the courts. That battle is going to be fought on the streets in protests and in collective action.

“I can’t predict the future,” they added. “But I certainly hope that America comes to its senses—and takes the steps that it needs to take—to value keeping money in the pockets of consumers and not in the pockets of big banks. But we’ll see.”