Musk, a confidante of the president-elect, is set to co-lead Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency.Tech billionaire Elon Musk has expressed support for binning a federal agency in the United States designed to protect consumers from predatory financial practices.
In an early-morning message on his social media platform X, Musk called for an end to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent watchdog agency with oversight over banks and other financial institutions.
“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk wrote on Wednesday.
Musk is set to advise the administration of President-elect Donald Trump in the new year, in a newly created role to slash government bureaucracy.
Trump announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, on November 13, with Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at its head.
On social media, the president-elect described the department as a commission that would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to “restructure Federal Agencies”.
Musk, an entrepreneur known for the rocket company SpaceX and the electric car business Tesla, has already started to name federal agencies he feels should come on the chopping block.
Also on Wednesday, he posted a poll on X asking viewers to weigh in on what should happen to the budget for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes.
The most popular result was to have its budget “deleted”.
Musk later responded affirmatively to a commenter who called for the Department of Government Efficiency to audit the IRS: “Gonna happen.”
Musk’s comment about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, however, is one of the most direct signals yet that the agency could come under attack during Trump’s second term.
Founded in July 2011, the bureau was a r …