Last month, in one of his final acts as outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Rohit Chopra proposed to restrict financial institutions from dropping customers based on their political or religious views. If adopted, the rule would have been the most politically significant of Chopra’s many reforms: after all, Right-wing activists have been the most frequent victims of debanking.
In 2021, PayPal blocked GiveSendGo, an evangelical crowdfunding site, after it helped raise money for January 6 defendants. In Canada, truckers resisting Covid vaccine mandates faced similar bans. Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage was debanked. As Chopra told me, “just because someone disagrees with corporate executives, that’s no grounds for losing their fundamental rights”.
Chopra also spearheaded Team Biden’s crusade against corporate “junk fees” (ordering a concert ticket online? That’ll be a $5 service fee, plus a $15 processing fee and a $3 convenience fee). He also sought to wipe medical debt from credit records and to protect veterans’ privacy against data brokers. Trumpian America would have been the chief beneficiary of these measures: lower-income consumers with little to no bargaining power against Big Finance and Big Tech.
Yet in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, powerful tech barons vented rage at Chopra’s agency. Most notably, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg — who previously oversaw the censorship of pro-Trump content on Facebook but is now making nice — complained about CFPB oversight on Joe Rogan’s show: “We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up.”
Elon Musk was more forthright: “Delete CFPB”, he posted on X on 27 November. That seems to have done the trick. As of last week, visitors to the CFPB website encountered a “404: page not found” error. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is dramatically remaking the federal government, gloated about the agency’s apparent demise with a tombstone emoji, adding: “CFPB RIP”.
