By Liz Goodwin · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) invited tech billionaire Elon Musk to testify at an informal hearing focusing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau next week, as the Trump adviser pledges to destroy the agency she helped create.
Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, is organizing the hearing for the afternoon of Feb. 25, giving Senate Democrats an opportunity to question witnesses and highlight the work the agency has done to protect consumers from scams.
“Musk has said that he is trying to kill the agency – he should have the courage to show up in public and answer questions about why he’s doing that and how it would help working people,” Warren said in an interview.
Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on his X social media platform as the Trump administration ordered CFPB employees to stop nearly all of their work earlier this month. A district judge ordered the Trump administration not to fire the agency’s employees or delete its data for now, pending a March 3 hearing on a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union, whose members include CFPB workers.
Republicans have long targeted the regulatory agency, arguing that it has too much power. Democrats are hoping to highlight what they see as the folly behind Republicans dismantling an agency designed to prevent consumers from being taken advantage of by lenders or other financial institutions. The group has returned $21 billion to consumers since it was created in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in 2010, which was aimed at preventing another financial crisis.
Warren has invited Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and Lorelei Salas, the former head of supervision at the CFPB who recently resigned after refusing an order to stop work at the agency, to testify. Campbell will speak about a recent $51 million settlement she reached with the help of the CFPB against a credit repair company that was claiming to boost credit scores for a fee. The forum will also feature people who have relied on the CFPB to get their money back. Democrats are in the minority in the Senate, meaning Warren does not have the power to convene a formal hearing under the auspices of the banking committee and compel testimony.
“President Trump ran on lowering costs for Americans immediately on day one – those were his words,” Warren said. “It’s been a month now and he’s done nothing to lower the cost of groceries, health care or housing, but he and co-president Elon Musk are running up the cost of ordinary financial transactions like credit cards and checking accounts for people all across this country.”
Musk’s social media company X is launching its own payment product called “X Money” – an area regulated by the consumer agency.
Warren said she believes Musk is targeting the agency to launch that service with less oversight.
“By sidelining the CFPB, he gets that only obstacle out of the way,” Warren said. “Like a bank robber who sidelines the cops just before he waltzes into the lobby of the bank.”
A representative for Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the tech billionaire has said that he’s being “maximally transparent” and that the public would be able to judge for themselves if he is “doing something that benefits one of my companies or not.”
The issue is personal for Warren, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020 on a platform of economic populism.
As a consumer debt expert in her law professor days, Warren argued that U.S. credit institutions frequently took advantage of average Americans with tricks and traps that mostly went unpunished. In a 2007 article, she proposed the idea of a watchdog consumer organization that would serve as a “cop on the beat” for people with mortgages, car loans and other forms of credit.
That idea became reality after the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in 2010 created the agency, in part as a response to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that was spurred by financial institutions pushing irresponsible subprime mortgages. President Barack Obama appointed Warren to set up the new agency and hire its staff, but stopped short of making her its first director.
The CFPB has survived multiple lawsuits challenging its funding structure and the first Trump administration, when its acting head, who opposed the agency’s existence, dramatically slowed the pace of enforcement actions.
“The giant banks resisted this agency from before it was born,” Warren said. “Republicans have preached the gospel for decades that government is always bad, always stupid and always inept. The CFPB proves every single day that we can make government work for people.”