Elizabeth Warren to Elon Musk: ‘You Don’t Get to Slither Around in the Dark’

Elon Musk and the Trump administration have turned off the lights at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, prohibiting staffers from working, and announcing they will turn off the “spigot” of bureau funding from the Federal Reserve.

To take stock of the damage, Rolling Stone reached out to the architect of the CFPB, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) The bureau was an answer to the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis — created by Congress to safeguard Americans from abusive and irresponsible lenders, as well as to provide a bulwark against systemic financial risks. 

The CFPB has been a rare bright spot for working people in Washington, returning more than $20 billion to consumers who were tricked or cheated by payday lenders, repo men, big banks, and other financial fraudsters.

On Monday, Warren joined a protest by CFPB union members to rally Americans in defense of the bureau’s work, and to condemn Musk, who aims to launch his own payments network, likening him to “a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarms just before he strolls into the lobby.” 

Musk is leading Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was granted sweeping access to sensitive CFPB data systems before the administration moved to effectively shutter the bureau, as it had done earlier with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). 

Warren spoke by phone, decrying a lawless Republican administration that has drawn America to the doorstep of a “constitutional crisis.” 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Trump campaigned on the idea that he was going to be the champion of the working stiff — the garbage man and the tipped worker. And yet, one of the first things that he’s done as president is to try to gut one of the few agencies in Washington that actually looks out for people who need a payday loan or carry a credit card balance or need a student loan. What do you make of that contradiction?

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Donald Trump campaigned on lowering costs for working families “on day one.” He is now sidelining the agency that over the last dozen years, has returned $21 billion directly to people who got cheated by giant financial institutions. In other words, his plan is to do nothing on reducing costs, but sure enough, put in place a plan to raise costs for people who are working hardest in our economy.

Amid some ugliness about you personally, Trump claimed Monday that the CFPB was set up to “destroy people,” and he rued its success at harming “very great people.” What did you make of that in the context of CFPB’s enforcement actions?

Over the past few years, 6.7 million people filed complaints with the CFPB. Finally, in America, they had someone on their side when they went up against a giant bank or a fly-by-night, sleazy lender. They got some help — a little more of a level playing field. Donald Trump wants to take that away from them. He can call me whatever he wants, but what he’s hoping to do is distract people from his failure to cut costs for families, and his willingness to play up to the billionaires who would like to get rid of the CFPB.

This speaks to a conflict of interest. I was talking to a CFPB lawyer over the weekend who pointed to Elon Musk’s plans to turn X into a payment platform. And then, of course, the Trump family has all kinds of strange financial instruments, from meme coins to one World Liberty Financial. It’s unclear exactly what they have planned. To what extent is hobbling CFPB in their self interest?

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Elon Musk has lost money hand over fist on X. So his next plan is to create X Money and provide a payment platform and get access to everyone’s financial information. He has one obstacle in the way — the CFPB. That’s the financial cop that will look over his shoulder and make sure that he follows all consumer protection laws, and that he’s not sucking up personal data for his own financial interests. Elon Musk has decided that one way not to have to deal with the problem of the CFPB is just to get rid of it, and Donald Trump seems A-OK with that.

There are also concerns about Musk’s minions at DOGE, and the kind of data they’re hoovering up already — including proprietary info about Musk’s financial competitors. So the concern is that he’s not only destroying his regulator, but on the way out, looting information that could serve his purposes.

I think that’s exactly right. By setting loose his team of hackers on the CFPB databases, Musk has the opportunity not only to harvest personal financial information from Americans, he also can get a good look at what his competitors are up to — both for good and for bad — and exploit that information in any way that helps him. The conflicts here are monumental. I’ve been in the fight against conflicts of interest for a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like the Musk conflicts. They are the Mount Everest of conflicts — something on a scale that no one had contemplated. 

Musk has figured out that spending $288 million to get Donald Trump elected is a smart investment that he’s planning to collect on — and sidelining the CFPB and putting his little suck-ups in there to take the data from that agency will create a return on investment many times over.

I’ve been struck recently that it may be that our entire democracy was for sale for $288 million — which is a staggeringly cheap price in the scope of things. To what extent are we now in a constitutional crisis based on Musk being the unofficial head of government and a lawless one at that?

We have our toes on the line of a constitutional crisis right now. Much of the lawlessness of Musk and Trump is being litigated through the courts. Courts are in the process of issuing orders to Musk and Trump, telling them they must obey the law. That shouldn’t be a news item, but with these two guys, it is. 

If Musk and Trump want to try to ignore those orders, then the courts are going to issue contempt citations and potentially put people in jail. That’s when we’re headed into the constitutional crisis. Right now, we’re still in the courts. And if Musk and Trump don’t like the court rulings, they can certainly take an appeal. But the Constitution is clear. We have three co-equal branches of government, and the courts’ decisions on who is and is not abiding by the law controls the administration.

I know you must have some cordial relationships with Republicans in the Senate. What are those discussions like right now? It seems that they’re abrogating their power of the purse, handing it over to Musk, in the idea of him being able to zero out funding for essential grants, or NIH funding, an entire agency, as with USAID.

They know that Trump and Musk are violating the law. Evidently, they hope that they can tip-toe past that reality and that Trump won’t attack them. But that’s a loser’s game. Donald Trump must be held accountable, and that means he must follow the law. Democrats and Republicans in Congress know that. That’s why we’re in this moment where people are talking about a constitutional crisis.

You’re unusually comfortable in rallying public support behind your ideas. I was doing reporting on Indivisible, and you showed up on a conference call telling folks they’ve got to turn up the heat on, yourself and your colleagues. But I will say that many Democrats have appeared willing let the proverbial shit hit the fan, and then let people understand Republicans are why they are so unhappy. Is this constitutional crisis is giving people a rethink about that strategy? Because the consequences of the Trump and Musk agenda are too severe? 

There’s real energy in Congress and back home in all of our states. People are beginning to appreciate just how lawless Elon Musk, DOGE, and the entire Trump administration are willing to be. The importance of fighting back is getting clearer every day.

If you could summon Elon to your office right now, What would you say to him?

Elon? If you want to cut costs, there are legal ways to do that — in fact, some damn good ways. I’ve got a long list. And if you want to get rid of an agency like the CFPB, there are legal ways to do that. Come fight it out here in Congress. But you have to be willing to stand up and defend your ideas and persuade people to vote for them. You don’t get to slither around in the dark and put a handful of teenage hackers into the middle of [America’s] payments systems, as a way to give yourself control of the functioning of our government. 

Any final thoughts?

If you watched the hearing today [with Jerome Powell], I just want to underscore the chairman of the Federal Reserve said right out loud there are no financial cops on the beat for big banks, for money platforms, for other payment systems. Nobody is out there to enforce the law. The laws haven’t changed, but if there are no cops, you better believe criminal activity will be on the rise.

At what point does that risk become systemic?

it runs the risk of becoming systemic immediately, because it’s the biggest players with the biggest networks. It’s the most aggressive players who have just been turned loose.