"Too much duplication"

Financial sector: Musk wants an end to consumer protection

(Bild: Wikipedia/ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0))

Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tasked by future US President Donald Trump with cutting unnecessary bureaucracy, called for the abolition of the Consumer Protection Agency in the financial sector on Wednesday. With further postings, he also made government employees a public target.

"Scrap the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). There are too many duplicate regulators," Musk wrote on the short messaging service X (formerly Twitter), which he owns. The agency did not initially respond to a request for comment.

The independent CFPB, based in Washington, was set up to oversee and regulate consumer financial products after the 2008 global financial crisis. Only Congress has the authority to abolish it.

Republicans have long sought to curtail the agency's powers or abolish it altogether. Banking executives and lawyers now expect the Trump administration to impose significant restrictions on the CFPB.

Names of officials published on X
Trump has appointed tech billionaire Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head a department called the Department of Government Efficiency. He hopes that this will lead to massive savings in the government apparatus. Since then, many state employees have feared for their jobs - and not without good reason, as another of Musk's actions shows.

He has published several posts on his X platform in which he names four employees whose positions he considers superfluous. "So many pseudo-jobs", he writes on a post calling for the abolition of the "Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)" department. The name of the employee and her place of work can also be seen.

For other employees, Musk complains about salaries that he believes are too high. There are numerous hate comments under the postings in question. In the past, people who have been mentioned negatively by Trump or Musk have reported death threats against them.