Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and the current head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is the new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Wall Street Journal reported late Friday night.
Vought emailed top staffers at the agency to inform them that he’d been named acting director, the Journal reported.
His apparent appointment comes on the heels of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gaining “read only” access to all of the agency’s files. Musk, an ally of Vought, has pledged to “delete” the agency.
President Trump one week ago fired Biden-appointed Rohit Chopra and appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take over. Bessent put a pause on the administration’s investigations, rule-making and communication practices.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a stop work order, but certainly there’s a lot less going on, and I think a lot of it is people are just fearful of doing things more than anything else — it’s like, well, if I do something, will I get in trouble for doing this? We do still have regular meetings though,” a staffer at the agency told HousingWire on Friday.
The CFPB’s union has strongly protested the involvement of DOGE at the agency.
“Certain DOGE employees were added to the CFPB”s email directory and were spotted in the building,” the union said in a statement Saturday. “Bargaining unit employees of the CFPB Union NTEU 335 are deeply concerned that despite the CFPB’s robust data security protocols, cybersecurity training, and vigorous efforts to mitigate reidentification risks, such legally-protected, sensitive data of businesses and individuals will be exposed and used in inappropriate ways.”
The union also noted that it had gathered a “wealth of proprietary information from big tech payment platforms that could be exploited by someone with a conflict of interest to corner the payments industry,” and pointed to a newly announced partnership between X and Visa.
Vought, a veteran of the first Trump administration, has worked for years dismantle the so-called administrative state.
The CFPB, often criticized by the mortgage industry, said it has returned $19 billion to customers since it was founded in 2011, but is a primary target of Republicans and could potentially be defunded for the duration of the Trump administration.
