WASHINGTON — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recently been one of President Donald Trump’s targets in his attempt to rapidly reduce the size of government. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now claims to have canceled over 100 contracts with the agency in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, according to its “Wall of Receipts” website.
The CFPB was established to protect Americans from predatory banking practices. It is one of several reforms implemented by the Dodd-Frank Act in the aftermath of the 2008 housing and financial crisis.
But, over the last month, the Trump administration has been dismantling it. Russel Vought, the newly appointed Office of Management and Budget Director, issued an email on February 8 ordering the agency to halt all work and close its building.
On Monday, a federal judge heard arguments from attorneys representing the National Treasury Employees Union, which is seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent Vought, the CFPB’s acting director, from shutting down the agency.
Jackson scheduled a follow-up hearing for next week and stated that a top agency official, CFPB chief operating officer Adam Martinez, would be required to testify about the shutdown. While the hearing was taking place, CFPB employees rallied outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. for the entire morning.
According to Musk’s agency, DOGE, 216 contracts with the CFPB have been canceled. 136 of those contracts are with businesses in the District of Columbia, Maryland, or Virginia.
Many of the contracts are with consulting firms in the area. Some were for news services like Politico Pro, Bloomberg Industry Group, and Law 360.
The website’s default is to display the value of the contracts, with prominent displays of the alleged sticker value. However, switching to the savings tab reveals that many of these canceled contracts do not save any money at all.
44 of the 136 local contracts save zero dollars. One canceled contract claims it saved $1.
The most expensive contract canceled was with FedSight, a consulting firm based in Leesburg, Virginia. DOGE estimated it was worth $65.5 million, and canceling it saved approximately $2.5 million in spending. The contract required the consultants to provide project management office support services, according to the DOGE website.
The least expensive contract canceled, worth only $29,447, was with the D.C.-based firm Planning, Arrangements, Logistics Specialists, LLC. The firm provided personal assistant services, according to the DOGE website, and canceling the contract allegedly saved $17,528.
DOGE claims it saved more than $53 million by canceling contracts with the CFPB in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia alone. The alleged total value of all contracts in the area is almost $295 million.
Despite all of these statistics, the difficult-to-navigate website is even more difficult to verify. WUSA9 has been unable to independently verify the DOGE numbers at this time.
