“This is code red”: Trump’s Project 2025 agenda comes for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Trump administration is trying to kill off another independent federal agency in apparent disregard of the law.

In an email sent Monday, Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who was recently confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget, instructed employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stay home and refrain “from performing any work task,” according to a copy of the missive obtained by independent journalist Marisa Kabas. The news was subsequently confirmed by Bloomberg and Law360.

Vought’s efforts to shutter the agency without congressional approval, which includes ordering its Washington office closed this week, has already provoked lawsuits from the union that represents CFBP employees, NBC News reported. The union is also suing to prevent operatives associated with Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from accessing CFPB data.

The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to address fraud and abuse perpetrated by lending institutions. Since its founding in 2011, the agency has obtained more than $21 billion in relief for consumers impacted by banks and other creditors engaging in fraudulent or abusive practices, according to CFBP’s website. The agency has also imposed more than $5 billion in civil penalties on those who have violated consumers’ rights.

But the CFPB has long been in the crosshairs of Republicans and their financial backers, who have decried efforts to rein in Wall Street as big government meddling and lamented the agency’s ability to act independent of political interferene. In a chapter dedicated to CFPB, Project 2025 contributor Robert Bowes wrote that “the next conservative president should order the immediate dissolution of the agency — pull down its prior rules, regulations and guidance, return its staff to their prior agencies and its building to to the General Services Administration.”

President Donald Trump appears determined to do just that, despite the fact that CFPB was created by a 2010 law passed by Congress, deepening what even some conservative scholars say is now a constitutional crisis.

“If you have a bank account, or credit card or mortgage or student loan, this is code red. I am ringing the alarm bell,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a video posted Monday on social media. Warren, who first proposed creating the agency, said the effort will be opposed in Congress and the courts, but the senator has also embraced street protests, planning to speaking Monday afternoon at a rally outside CFBP’s shuttered headquarters in Washington, DC.

Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the progressive advocacy group Indivisible, which organized the protest, said the effort to dissolve CFPB was an “illegal” and “blatant” attempt to seize power and shield moneyed interests from oversight.

“This is a five-alarm fire for anyone who gives a damn about holding corporate thieves accountable,” she said in a statement.” The CFPB is a lifeline for working people, and we will not stand by while right-wing extremists and billionaire robber barons try to burn it to the ground.”