Last Friday, as the workweek drew to a close, Elon Musk announced that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the federal watchdog agency conceived by Elizabeth Warren and created under President Obama—was no more. “CFPB, RIP,” Musk tweeted, adding an emoji of a tombstone at the end.
In the second Trump administration, this is often how major announcements are made: via glib messages on social media that raise more questions than answers. Does the president even have the authority to shut down an entire federal agency? (He doesn’t.) Does Musk? (No, of course not.) Will they do it anyway? (Yes!) Will the courts intervene? (Shrug emoji.)
It’s possible that this is not the worst outcome for the CFPB—or the people whom the agency protects. The early days of the Trump administration show that it only has two modes: weaponization and destruction. If the CFPB were preserved, it wouldn’t continue its remarkably successful work. It would be contorted into a Mr. Hyde-ish version of itself, aimed solely at going after the enemies of Trump and Musk.
The CFPB investigates corporate abuses, and since its creation in 2010, in the wake of the last financial crisis, it has returned billions in corporate fraud and abuse to consumers. But the business and tech elites who have flocked to Trump in recent months despise the agency, and it has been a thorn in Musk’s side in particular: He blames it for blocking an effort to offer a real-time payments system on X, the social media platform he owns, in partnership with Visa. So he wants it gone, and on Monday we got a hint of how that might happen.
Trump probably can’t permanently shut down CFPB without congressional approval. But he, Musk, and Russell Vought—the newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget, who took command over the CFPB on Friday evening—can simply mothball it for years. On Monday, CFPB workers were sent a memo from Vought, the architect of the radical Project 2025, telling them to not only stay home but refrain from doing anything work-related at all. “Employees should not come into the office,” a memo read. “Please do not perform any work tasks.”
Thanks in large part to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, the first three weeks of Trump’s presidency have been perhaps the most frenetic since the opening of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term. But the ensuring chaos obscures a fundamental contradiction of Trump’s second term: Almost all of this activity is negative. Nothing is being created; much is being destroyed.
Along with the CFPB, Musk and his cronies have also shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development under remarkably cynical and flimsy pretexts, essentially arguing that the pillar of American soft power is little more than a funnel for fraud, cronyism, and leftist politics. The Department of Education seems like it will come under the ax at some point in the coming months, if not sooner. All of this is happening while Congress is readying a bill that will cut more than $1 trillion from the federal budget and will almost certainly include a drastic reduction in Medicaid spending, along with possible cuts to other welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Where there is proactive action, it almost always falls under one category: retaliation. Trump and his underlings are weaponizing the government against his personal and political enemies, for instance by firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and about two dozen Justice Department employees involved in the January 6 cases. Trump also picked Ed Martin, who took part in the January 6 insurrection, as the interim U.S. attorney for D.C.
The targets of this weaponization extend to entire groups of people—whether they be migrants or trans people or others—who have been demonized by the right. Lest you think the administration can only tear things down, it has shown itself to be remarkably nimble in pushing infrastructure to house tens of thousands of deportees, converting Guantánamo Bay into a massive concentration camp. Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at excluding, demonizing, and restricting the rights of trans people, while the heads of several agencies, most notably Pete Hegseth, the hard-drinking former TV host now heading the Department of Defense, have made rolling back accommodations aimed at trans and LGBTQ people a priority.
One could see something similar happening in the CFPB, where work being done on behalf of citizens is warped into the administration’s larger war against the enemies of Trump and Musk. (In the case of CFPB, the agency itself is the enemy.) The administration’s disinterest in taking over the agency points to something notable about Trump and Musk’s approach to governance: They have none. If an agency is even ostensibly public-serving, it gets axed. For instance, there seems to be little interest in what a Trumpian education policy might look like, beyond requiring schoolchildren to use bathrooms associated with their sex at birth, so we can expect the Department of Education to get the CFPB or USAID treatment soon.
For those horrified by this slash-and-burn approach to the federal government, there is a silver lining. At some point, Trump—and maybe even Musk—will run out of things to destroy and will have to govern proactively. All available evidence suggests they can’t, and when that moment comes, the honeymoon they are currently enjoying will end.
