Trump and His Project 2025 Chief Sued Over Sudden CFPB Shutdown

Donald Trump’s attempt to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been met with a lawsuit. 

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees at the bureau, on Sunday filed two lawsuits against Russell Vought, the newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB’s acting head. One lawsuit is seeking to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from gaining access to employee information, stating that three of the pseudo-department’s staffers were granted internal system access. 

The same day that Vought granted DOGE access to CFPB systems, the lawsuit alleges,  Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X. 

The second lawsuit attacks a directive from Vought issued in an email over the weekend ordering the CFPB’s employees to stop most, if not all, their work, including investigations and issuing new rules. The suit alleges that Vought’s directive “reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’s decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.” Vought also has refused to receive the agency’s latest funding disbursement. 

CFPB employees were told that their headquarters would be closed this week in a move reminiscent of what happened to the U.S. Agency for International Development last week. Just like at USAID, much of the bureau’s website is no longer working, and last week, Trump fired the agency’s director, Rohit Chopra. 

Closing the agency was a major recommendation in the conservative manifesto, Project 2025, and Vought, as one of the document’s architects, is clearly carrying out that goal along with Musk and Trump. It seems that much like the rest of the Trump’s administration’s wanton actions, the fate of the CFPB will be decided in the courts.

A Freudian slip from the secretary of Homeland Security might have revealed her own personal take on Elon Musk’s federal takeover—and its residual national security risks.

Speaking with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, a recently confirmed Kristi Noem momentarily seemed to forget that she—and the world’s richest man—are now part of the government that their longtime rhetoric so vehemently rejects.

“I remember a time when Republicans were very careful about, and worried about, the government—particularly unelected people—having access to personal data,” Bash said.

“Well, we can’t trust the government anymore,” Noem responded.

“You are the government,” Bash pressed.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Noem continued. “The American people now are saying that we have had our personal information shared and out there in the public—”

“But now Elon Musk has access to it,” Bash interjected.

“Yes, but Elon Musk is part of the administration that is helping us identify where we can find savings and what we can do and he has gone through the processes to make sure that he has the authority that the president has granted him,” Noem said.

“You’re totally comfortable with him,” Bash continued.

“I am today by the work that he is doing identifying waste, fraud, and abuse. His information that he has is looking at programs, not looking at personal data and information,” Noem continued, evading the fact that the billionaire actually has tapped into sensitive data—such as federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories—for hundreds of millions of Americans. “This audit needs to happen to make sure we are going through a process that adds integrity back into these programs.”

Whether Musk even has the proper clearances to access such sensitive data has been an ongoing topic of discussion. Last week, Trump designated Musk a “special government employee,” which, per the Justice Department, is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.” But hours after the appointment, even top officials in the administration weren’t confident that Musk had cleared a background check to do the job.

On Thursday, a U.S. District Court in Washington acknowledged the apparent threat of Musk’s rapid involvement in the government, blocking him and two of his DOGE groupies from further accessing government databases.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had an exasperating, circular argument on Sunday regarding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now having unfettered access to troves of personal data housed in the department.

“The Washington Post is reporting that Musk and his DOGE team have access to FEMA’s sensitive disaster data, which includes personal information about tens of thousands of disaster victims,” Bash said to Noem. “Have you authorized Elon Musk and his team to have access to Americans’ personal data that is housed inside DHS?”

“We’re working with them at the president’s direction, to find what we can do to make our department much more efficient,” Noem replied. “This is essentially an audit.”

“That’s different from him having access to personal data that is housed in—”

“The president has authorized him to have access,” Noem said curtly.

“And you feel comfortable with that?” Dash asked.

“Absolutely!’

“I remember a time when Republicans were very careful about, and worried about … the government—particularly unelected people—having—”

“Well we can’t trust the government anymore,” Noem retorted.

“You are the government,” Bash said.

Noem went on to reiterate the same point again: An unelected billionaire having personal access to this kind of information is totally fine because Trump said so, years of Republican policy be damned.

This is just another moment in Trump’s all-out blitz on the federal government, as he allows Musk and his team of young cronies to hack away at critical parts of our federal apparatus. A federal judge just rebuked DOGE’s attempted takeover of the Treasury on Saturday, and multiple lawsuits have been filed by states and labor unions against DOGE for violating privacy rights. But that hasn’t stopped Musk yet.

Donald Trump is once again taking shots at Taylor Swift, because it’s normal for the president to have a problem with a pop star.

Both Trump and Swift were in attendance at the Super Bowl LIX Sunday, where they watched helplessly as the very popular Kansas City Chiefs were decimated by the righteous Philadelphia Eagles. At one point, the jumbotron showed Swift in the stands, and the crowd reacted poorly.

Swift, who has been dating the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce for more than a year, has proved herself to be a lightning rod for the more misogynist sports fans. She was able to shake it off, laughing with her famous friend Ice Spice, but Trump took the opportunity to revive his one-sided feud with the musician.

“The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving!”

Trump still seems sore that Swift endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and once pathetically declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Even before that, MAGA weren’t her biggest fans. However, it’s not clear that it was a MAGA crowd at all, but rather one composed mostly of Eagles fans cheering against her boyfriend.

Meanwhile, Trump fled the stadium during a very political halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar, after backing the losing team.

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans spent the weekend openly attacking the federal judiciary and, by extension, the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Elon Musk took the first shot early Sunday morning with an X post, angrily reacting to a federal judge blocking his“Department of Government Efficiency” from accessing Treasury Department records.

“A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” Musk posted.

Later, JD Vance chimed in with his own attack on the federal judiciary.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance posted.

Trump initially feigned ignorance when a reporter aboard Air Force One asked him about Vance’s statements later in the day, even attacking the journalist’s media outlet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Neither do you,” Trump said, asking the reporter who he was with. When the reporter replied “HuffPost, Sir,” Trump replied, “Oh, no wonder. I thought they died.”

Trump gave a more complete answer to another reporter.

“We’re very disappointed with the judges that would make such a ruling. But we have a long way to go. We have to look, we have to find all of the fraud that’s going on. We have tremendous fraud, tremendous waste, and tremendous abuse, and theft, by the way,” Trump said. “And the day you’re not allowed to look for theft and fraud, et cetera, then we don’t have much of a country. So, no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision. It’s a disgrace.”

These reactions are very worrying for the constitutional framework of the United States, where the separation of powers is supposed to provide a check from the judicial branch, represented by the courts, against the executive branch of the president and vice president. A billionaire oligarch like Musk is not supposed to have authority in the federal government, even if he is the world’s richest man, who funded the president’s campaign to the tune of $250 million.

Trump and Vance are floating the idea of ignoring federal court rulings against them, which would create a constitutional crisis in the United States. The conservative Supreme Court may not even step in to defend the separation of powers, and they’ve already granted Trump near-immunity. The Republican-led Congress will never even consider impeaching the president, either. What is to be done?