Pod Insights Decoder Why DOGE is killing the agency that stops banks from ripping you off About this episode Rohit Chopra was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk’s DOGE began trying to dismantle the agency. The CFPB has been pretty popular since it was founded in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers, so shutting it down has kicked off a bunch of controversies — not least of which was whether Trump and Musk even had the power to do it.
This all led me to ask several times who made the decision to fire him, who is currently responsible for the various policies of our government, and whether any of those things add up to a clear plan. Some of the most powerful executives in the world answer questions like this on Decoder all the time. But Rohit just didn’t know — and that should probably be as worrying as anything.
Links:
Trump fires CFPB director Rohit Chopra | Associated Press
Trump orders CFPB to stop work, closes building | Associated Press
CFPB workers reinstated after court order but still can’t work | The Verge
Trump admin to appeal order blocking CFPB shutdown | Bloomberg Law
A shady tech bootcamp may be sneaking back online | The Verge
CFPB won’t enforce long-awaited payday lending rule | Bloomberg Law
CFPB seeks to vacate redlining settlement, refund lender | Banking Dive
CFPB signals it will drop rule regulating BNPL like credit cards | PYMTS
CFPB drops fraud lawsuit against banks, Zelle | CNBC
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 8,310 words · 10 speakers
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1:33 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Rohit Chopra, who was the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk's Doge began trying to dismantle the agency. The CFPB has been around for about 15 years now. It was started in 2010, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, in order to protect consumers from the kinds of lending and credit schemes that led to that crash. Broadly speaking, the CFPB has been pretty popular. This is the agency that prohibits predatory lending practices, limits credit card fees, and investigates various kinds of financial fraud. So shutting it down kicked off a number of controversies, not least of which was whether or not Trump and Musk
2:17 Speaker 04 even had the power to do it. After all, the CFPB was created by Congress in a law. And the Constitution says the president is supposed to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed. Not reinterpreted by an un-elect to billionaire who is deep into crypto. I don't think that idea came up at all with the founders, actually. It's been a minute since I watched Hamilton, but I don't think that was part of it. Anyway, this all led me to ask Rohit several times, who made the decision to fire him? And who is currently responsible for the various policies of our government? And whether any of those things add up to a clear plan for which someone can actually be held accountable in the end. I ask questions like this on Decoder all the time, and there are usually answers, even from some of those powerful executives in the world.
2:59 Speaker 04 In fact, especially from some of the most powerful executives in the world. But here, well, you're just gonna hear Rohit say over and over again that he doesn't know. Sincerely, I don't think he knows. I don't know if anyone knows. And that should probably be as worrying as anything right now. Rohit and I also talked about the obvious clash between the two sides of the Trump coalition, the Elon Musk tech libertarians and the more populist MAGA wing. These two factions are currently fighting over tariffs in very public and very loud ways, but they seem poised to be ever more at odds as Trump reshapes even more of the government. The CFPB sits right in the middle of that kind of fight. It's a lot easier for Elon to turn X into an everything app crypto payments platform without a regulator on the beat, but the populist swing of the party isn't exactly
3:43 Speaker 04 in love with big banks and big tech gaining even more power. I have no idea how any of that will play out, so I was curious to see if Rohit had any insight and what he was most worried about without an agency like the CFPB standing guard. There's a lot going on in this one. Former CFPB head Rohit Chopra, here we go.
4:16 Speaker 04 Rohit Chopra, you were the third director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You were a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. Briefly explain to people what the CFPB was meant to do.
4:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, we saw how much people lost wealth across the country after a massive mortgage crash. And there was a realization that there was really no one kicking the tires on some of these very big financial firms that were offering loans that were set up to fail. So they created an agency with some real teeth to go after the biggest financial companies, but others too, who were peddling loans, payments, and other financial products.
5:06 Speaker 04 Do you think that establishing all this oversight was a better solution than simply letting a bunch of people fail at their big businesses?
5:16 Speaker 05 Look, this is not a true capitalist system. When you had some of the biggest companies in the economy at the time, the big Wall Street banks, screw up. And then many of them actually grew bigger and more powerful on the other side. So it's not an either or, it should have been an and, where there was tougher enforcement to look after consumers, but also really making sure that those bailouts could never happen again. There was not enough fixes, and I think we are still feeling the anger from those bailouts even today.
5:53 Speaker 04 It seems like today, no one's exactly sure what to do with their anger. In the government right now, you've got Trump's faction that has a lot of popular, maybe even populist anger at big banks, big business, and big tech. And then you've got Elon Musk, who kind of wants to be an avatar of tech and business, empowered to tear down all the parts of the government that can do anything about big business and big banks and all that. You were right at the center of that storm. How do you square those things?
6:18 Speaker 05 Well, that was clearly two big factions, and one of those factions won out. A lot of people were hoping on Wall Street I'd be fired in day one, but I actually kept going for a few more weeks. And in fact, Donald Trump went and gave a speech at Davos calling out Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, the CEOs of JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. But then, not so long later, just a few weeks, we do see Elon Musk take decisive steps. And here's what's interesting.
6:57 Speaker 05 To fire the technologists and investigators at the CFPB very, very quickly. And of course, this is coming at a moment where the CFPB is needing to look more and more at tech giants because they are increasingly infiltrating payments and lending.
7:18 Speaker 04 You got fired. Was that a phone call from Donald Trump? Was that a phone call from Elon Musk?
7:22 Speaker 05 It's a letter.
7:23 Speaker 04 It's a letter.
7:24 Speaker 05 You get a letter.
7:26 Speaker 04 How did the letter arrive? Was it USPS? Was it email? Was it PDF?
7:30 Speaker 05 You get it electronically, though I think they probably sent one, a hard copy, too.
7:35 Speaker 04 I'm always interested in these little details. Was this, literally, did you open a PDF and say, well, that happened?
7:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think I read it and I was prepared for that moment. We had said very clearly, I'm not going to resign. I serve a five-year term. But if they want to replace me, that's their right. And then I think they were in a war with each other about are they actually going to use this agency to go after abuses by big financial firms and big tech firms? Or are they going to defund the police that look after Silicon Valley and Wall Street? And they chose the latter.
8:18 Speaker 04 When you say they, who specifically do you mean?
8:21 Speaker 05 I don't know, but at the end of the day, that's what the White House decided.
8:26 Speaker 04 Do you think Donald Trump made that decision?
8:28 Speaker 05 I have no clue, but certainly he's the one that has to ultimately sign off on who leads these agencies.
8:36 Speaker 04 I'm asking this very specifically because you being fired in that, from that role, specifically requires a kind of presidential authority.
8:45 Speaker 05 That's right.
8:46 Speaker 04 You not knowing who made the decision to fire you seems like a central part of the story here. And it seems like you are unwilling to assign that decision to Donald Trump individually.
8:57 Speaker 05 No, I mean, look. That's his call. It's his signature on it. There's no question that he fired me. But really, who was in the room and who was pushing for what? I don't know. I certainly see the signs that Elon Musk played an enormous role in that. Interestingly, it was just before Thanksgiving, a few weeks after the election. Elon Musk tweets, we need to delete the CFPB. Late January, Twitter X inks a deal with Visa to become a new platform to move payments.
9:39 Speaker 05 And a few days later, I was fired. I don't know, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that there was a voice, not necessarily from Wall Street, but from the big tech companies and Elon Musk that was really calling the shots.
9:56 Speaker 04 We're seeing already a number of very fast decisions to overturn decisions you've made or policies that the CFPB had. The Senate just voted to overturn rules about overdrafting at checking accounts. The CFPB itself has announced now that they won't enforce the payday lending rule. There's all kinds of this stuff happening. We're seeing companies that were previously penalized starting to light back up and advertise again.
10:18 Speaker 05 And by the way, issuing a series of pardons, including to Capital One, including to JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, and a long list of other companies. These were in courtrooms across the country and those cases were pulled out without any explanation.
10:38 Speaker 04 How do you think people should assess the risks of not having a regulator like the CFPB there right now?
10:44 Speaker 05 Well, I feel we're at a moment right now that everyone thinks that their data is being harvested, that there are more risks online to our privacy, to our identity. Our voices and images about ourselves can be cloned. There really is so much that people are at risk for, and many people don't feel they have any other options and they're just hoping that someone is looking after all this. You know, when I board a plane.
11:20 Speaker 05 I'm not going to read up on all of the history of the aircraft. I expect that there is a regulator making sure that that plane is not going to burst in flames. When I walk into a building in an elevator, I have to expect that someone has inspected to make sure that that elevator is not going to come crashing down and kill people. So people really want to see some meaningful inspection and oversight, especially when it comes to how much money is at stake.
11:56 Speaker 04 You mentioned Elon Musk several times here. It seems like he is playing a central role in deciding who the regulators are, how the regulators will work. He has wanted X to become the everything app and do payments. I'm not sure that will ever happen, but that's what he has said he's wanted. He obviously does lending with Tesla. He's involved in a lot of things that access our payments infrastructure, that access to the financial system. Do you think that his approach is strategic? Do you see a plan in the moves that he is making? Or do you see sort of random destruction?
12:28 Speaker 05 It could be both. There was lots of worry about when his folks got into the CFPB systems, who were they snooping on? Were they looking at some of the plans of their competitors? What were they downloading? And look, this is not unique to X. We have seen this in many other gigantic tech firms. Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and said, why is the CFPB looking at me? We're doing social media, not acknowledging the fact that a few years ago, he tried to create a new currency and is increasingly.
13:10 Speaker 05 Into the world of financial products, Google, Apple, they are the ones that move so many payments when we tap our phones. So I do think there is a little bit of jealousy that some of these tech firms in the US have over their Chinese counterparts. Look at how Alipay, WeChat Pay have a window into every single consumer transaction, it seems like. It's so ubiquitous, they are able to match that information with geolocation, with friends and contact lists, with search history and so much more. So it's no surprise
13:50 Speaker 05 to me that there is a race to have all of the data about our payments and transactions because I think there's going to be big money in that for them. And we felt it was important to make sure that the existing laws, financial privacy, fraud, all of it, were actually being enforced.
14:11 Speaker 04 There's the argument from Silicon Valley that I hear all the time, that the regulations are actually too burdensome, that it prevents them from building all the things they want to do. Do you think we had the appropriate set of regulations that just needed to be enforced more consistently and more transparency? Or did we need more? Or did we need less?
14:29 Speaker 05 In some cases, we need the laws and the rules to just have brighter lines, being very clear on this is what you can and can't do. And it is often true, when the sausage is made and goes through the system, it can be complicated. But, you know, at the same time, these are laws and rules. And when a small bank or a tiny tech company violates them, they feel like their whole business is on the line. But when the biggest players violate those laws, sometimes with impunity, it feels like they just get a fine and they
15:12 Speaker 05 move on. And I think that was something that I really tried to correct, that we should focus on the biggest actors that are repeat offenders, and to make sure that all the little players were not being choked off by some of the biggest gatekeepers and banks. And I'm not saying we ever got it perfectly right, but we have to have laws and we have to enforce them.
15:38 Speaker 04 At a very fundamental level, having and enforcing laws feels like it should be simple. But of course, it often isn't. Maybe right now, more than ever.
15:47 Speaker 04 We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll get into what's happening with the CFPB now. We'll be right back.
15:59 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
16:27 Speaker 02 Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out. In. Dashboard. Confessions.
16:37 Speaker 03 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
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17:31 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking with former CFPB head Rohit Chopra. Right before the break, he was explaining that although the letter he got firing him from his job had President Trump's signature on it, he doesn't really know who actually orchestrated his firing, because this administration is not only opaque, but made up of a whole bunch of factions that don't always see eye to eye themselves. That brings us to now with the CFPB. Obviously, you have left, but there have been lawsuits about the agency. The employees are theoretically supposed to be back at work. It's unclear if they're actually working. What is the current status of the agency?
18:06 Speaker 05 There is lots and lots of money being completely wasted by putting all of the staff essentially on the bench. They are not continuing investigations. They are not distributing money that are supposed to be refunded to people. They are not doing those basic inspections of very large financial companies that the law specifically instructs them to do. Right now, there's lots of litigation about this. A court has put a pause on any further destruction to the CFPB. But of course, the proof is going to be in the pudding. When are they
18:49 Speaker 05 actually going to enforce the law and do their job? Or are they just going to keep paying people to sit at home?
18:57 Speaker 04 Do you think the courts are going to allow Trump and Musk to just dismantle an agency without an act of Congress?
19:04 Speaker 05 The president can't unilaterally repeal a law.
19:07 Speaker 04 Do you think it's possible to maintain the CFPB and its enforcement actions in the sort of economy that Trump seems to envision, where we're doing tariffs on big partners, we're trying to move a lot of investment back to the United States, and then we're basically deregulating huge swaths of the rest of the economy?
19:24 Speaker 05 I think that is a recipe for a mess. There's greater signs right now that the country could be heading into a recession. And if there is a recession, that's a time when we start seeing the auto repossession, the mortgage foreclosure, the student loan defaults. And that's exactly when you need a CFPB. Because if you do not have any watchdog and you just have a lapdog... That will be a place where families across the country could just lose trillions and their lives could be turned upside down.
20:00 Speaker 04 You can see that there is a remarkable appetite for pain from this administration in particular. And you hear the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessin say, "The American dream is not cheap flat screens." You heard Elon Musk on the campaign trail say, "There will be some temporary hardship." You hear Donald Trump basically tell people to get over it. And then there's the stuff with Doge in particular that seems related to that bigger goal, right? They've wanted deep access to the payment system. That was one of the very early controversies. They want lots of access to data. They're insistent on getting access to Social Security in some way. How is that related to the work you were doing in the CFPB?
20:44 Speaker 04 Obviously, they probably want that data as well. And do you see some larger design here that makes sense to you?
20:50 Speaker 05 I don't. And I don't think there is anything really efficient about offering buyouts to employees. And then most of the people taking them were the ones who were planning to retire or planning to leave anyway. I don't think it's really efficient to lay off the people who are prosecuting companies that are fleecing the public from billions. So this does feel like an effort to delete and destroy rather than make more efficient. Why they're doing it, I don't know. But we're all going to pay the price. We might pay more for our loans. We might pay more in our financial life.
21:34 Speaker 05 But there's going to be a lot of hidden ways that we pay more, especially when it comes to health and safety. The more that the skies are not being patrolled, the more that toys and food is not being inspected, that's just going to have costs that you can't easily quantify.
21:57 Speaker 04 Do you think that there's some specific reason they're going after the treasury systems and the social security systems?
22:01 Speaker 05 I don't. I have heard a wide range, but the idea of having that level of insight into all payment transactions flowing from the government, it really raises, makes people raise their eyebrows as to what, where, what is that data being used for and who is it being handed to? And it seems like there's many instances where there is full admin privileges being given to employees to hunt through the data assets of key agencies.
22:41 Speaker 04 Do you think Doge has been successful in finding any waste, fraud or abuse?
22:44 Speaker 05 I'm sure. I mean, look, there, this is a constant thing. When I was leading this agency, there were places, we cut contracts, we eliminated a lot of the executive positions that my predecessor had created. And I'm sure there's some, I just don't know whether that's really the true goal.
23:05 Speaker 04 The CFPB's work over the last decade kind of made a lot of invisible things visible. If I'm having a bad interaction with a bank, well, there's just one of me against a big bank, I'm probably not going to be able to even pick a fight little and win it. But if the bank is hurting a lot of people, then an agency like the CFPB can see all those complaints and be empowered to actually do something about it. Another agency we see that kind of dynamic with is the Federal Trade Commission. You were one of the Democratic Commissioners at the FTC during the first Trump administration. But I'd say the FTC has not really been as effective as it could have or should have been for most of the last 40 years. The Reagan administration really pushed it into a really hands-off position and even Democratic administrations since then have not been as effective as
23:47 Speaker 04 they maybe should have been. But Biden brought in Lena Kahn as his FTC Chair and she got pretty well-known for trying to make the FTC really aggressive, particularly against big tech. And now in Trump's second administration, he's fired the two Democratic Commissioners, presumably to make the agency more compliant with his own vision. That seems to be illegal. They're suing, that's another episode. But the Chair who replaced Lena Kahn, Andrew Ferguson, also seems pretty aggressive when it comes to big tech and he's following some of Kahn's policies. It's kind of a tangled web. I'm wondering if you can unpack all of that.
24:20 Speaker 05 I think what you're seeing is two competing visions about what should the economy look like? There is a more populist version of that, which has some, you mentioned, you know, the new chair, some, some maybe support there. I don't know, but we'll, we'll see how it plays out in that Facebook case that goes to trial. We'll see how it plays out in that Google case. You know, I, I remember voting out that Facebook case in 2020, but it was not done with much support from Republican commissioners.
25:00 Speaker 05 It was two Democrats. I was one of them and one Republican. So it has always been a little bit difficult to follow how this plays out. But that's something I'm going to closely watch. I'm also going to closely watch on big bank mergers. Are they going to keep allowing some of the worst anti-competitive practices in mergers? Or are they going to stand up to it? And the jury's out right now.
25:26 Speaker 04 I think everyone understands that they can't fight Facebook alone, that posting the copy pasta about I don't give my copyright to Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram accomplishes approximately nothing. But if you look at a million people doing it, well, that's a million people who would like to renegotiate their terms of service with Meta. And that, I think, crosses party lines. That doesn't feel polarized to me, that people are sort of unhappy with the deal they're getting from tech giants across the board, particularly when it comes to their content and how it's used and their data and how it's used. Whether or not they really understand the details of it, there's a sense that more value is being taken away than being given back.
26:03 Speaker 05 I think that's right. I mean, look, there are so many things that large, powerful firms do.
26:11 Speaker 05 Knowing that maybe it will piss off a couple of customers and they'll complain. But for the most part, they know human behavior will click through that contract or agree to the new terms and conditions. And in some cases, we know that this is a business model. So many things, for example, have turned into subscriptions, knowing that they're just going to get more revenue because it's annoying to cancel. We found one bank charging a paper statement fee. It was a small fee, but they didn't print the statement or mail the statement. It was just a way to see if they could get away with it. So I agree with you.
26:55 Speaker 05 It's not really all that controversial, but this is the age we live in where there are a handful of firms that have so much power in the economy that we almost feel coerced into using them. And the only check on that is often working collectively to enforce the law through our agencies.
27:19 Speaker 04 The timing of this conversation, literally us recording right now, is pretty interesting. A few hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg was spotted walking into the White House. At the same time, about an hour ago, you were on stage with Steve Bannon at a Y Combinator conference, which seems pretty unlikely all around. I look at all that and it all feels very relationship based. It doesn't feel stable. It feels like the game is for everyone to cut deals and make friends. Like Zuck can go to the White House and offer to be useful to Trump if the White House can just make the FTC's antitrust case go away. But the Bannon wing of the MAGA movement wants Zuckerberg and everybody else out of the White House. Today, we literally had all these things happening at the same time. You and Steve Bannon talking about oligarchs while an oligarch was literally in the White House trying to curry favor. Like I'm saying, this just doesn't feel sustainable.
28:03 Speaker 04 These things are gonna have to come to a head. How do you see that playing out?
28:07 Speaker 05 I don't know. We have a lot in history we can look at, recall that. In the Nixon tapes, Nixon talked to his advisor once about making sure they opened up investigations against the big TV networks, almost to have a sort of Damocles over their heads. And the networks at some point decide all to err, I think this is right, Patricia Nixon's White House wedding, as a sort of olive branch that we're going to start giving you more favorable coverage. And I think there is this question here about are these tech companies just
28:49 Speaker 05 going to bend and be able to direct information in ways that are friendly to politicians in power? And I think that is really pretty scary. And ultimately, you can see the factions that are out there. And clearly, there will be a rumble over it.
29:13 Speaker 04 We have to take another short break here. We'll be back in just a minute.
29:25 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
29:53 Speaker 02 Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out. In. Dashboard. Confessions.
30:03 Speaker 03 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand, when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
30:11 Speaker 02 Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
30:24 Speaker 06 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
30:57 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking to the former CFPB head Rohit Chopra about what's happening at the CFPB and other federal regulators right now. For the break, we're talking about how there are different factions inside the Trump administration that seem to want different things. But although those factions aren't necessarily aligned on their goals or how to get there, the things they're doing all have equally destructive outcomes. The CFPB technically still exists, but as far as getting the work done, it's dead in the water. You can say the same thing for a whole lot of other agencies and departments right now, too, as Elon Musk's Doge gets hands-on access to more and more parts of the federal government and starts completely remaking it, or just tearing it down. So I had to ask, do any of these factions have a point? And for that matter, how do we tell who's doing what?
31:38 Speaker 04 There's an argument that this is good, actually, that these institutions have become dormant, that they have not been aggressive enough, that they have not protected consumers, that we have lived through crisis after crisis in the financial industry, and maybe burning them all down to start over is required. Do you see that? Do you see, okay, if I was going to clean sheet a bunch of these agencies, I actually need to get rid of this history? Or do you think you can recover from the moment we're in now?
32:05 Speaker 05 This argument of clean sheeting it, no one would design the system the way we have it to today. The real question is, what's their motive? When the CFPB was formed in 2010, they did delete an agency. They got rid of a failed agency. They stripped power from the Fed, the FTC, others, put it at the CFPB. It was a pretty big reorg, and it did lead to the agency getting dissolved. I don't know if their goal, though, here is to build something that works better. I think it could just be to destroy and defund the agencies that are checks on this powerful
32:49 Speaker 05 set of firms. And I think those firms like what they see.
32:54 Speaker 04 I'm going to push you on this one more time. Who is they in this telling?
32:58 Speaker 05 Well, obviously, it's the president and the people who are advising them.
33:03 Speaker 04 I'm curious if you mean if you think Trump has a specific vision for the United States government, or if you think he has a loose collection of advisors who are at odds with each other, who are fighting out to a goal that is to destroy most of the government, and Trump isn't interested in the details.
33:23 Speaker 05 He's ultimately the one that is accountable. And he has to own the decision of what is happening to the CFPB. He has to own the decision of what is happening to law enforcement across the country. So there probably are warring camps, but I do think that one of those camps has been winning out based on what we've been seeing.
33:48 Speaker 04 And that camp is the Elon and Doge camp.
33:50 Speaker 05 That's right.
33:51 Speaker 04 Wisconsin just had that huge special election for its state Supreme Court. Elon famously dumped tens of millions of dollars into it, trying to buy his preferred outcome. And then Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate, won by nine or 10 points. There's been some reporting that her margin significantly outperformed any of the campaign's internal polling. And it seems like Elon so visibly inserting himself into that race is a big part of why. That's a big turn on Elon, right? For years, we've covered him as though he has a fandom, right? He's online, he's got defenders and evangelists, people like cars in space. But right now, with the broader public, he is strikingly overwhelmingly unpopular. You got protests showing up to Tesla dealerships every week. People are showing up in his own
34:33 Speaker 04 gaming livestreams to heckle him. Who knows how long he will last. And then next to that, the populist nativist wing of the Trump coalition seems to have renewed cultural relevance, right? Lots of people think we shouldn't spend money helping to distribute food or medicine around the world, that we should put America first. I look at that and I see a bunch of people asking for a big competent government, a government that provides healthcare and education. But to do that, you would still have to spend money on Americans and protecting Americans' interests. The CFEB is an example of regulator that has been broadly popular, does something every day Americans can see. It gets money back in the pockets of consumers by suing the big banks. So having Elon tear it down is inefficient, right? It'll cost money in
35:17 Speaker 04 the end, and it will result in actual harm to a lot of people in a lot of very visible ways. That seems to just cut across Republican politics, right? It puts those two sides in conflict. So how do you make that argument? How do you connect those dots?
35:31 Speaker 05 No one seems to be able to follow it. You know, yesterday, the House of Representatives, every Republican except nine voted to hike overdraft fees in America. None of it feels really consistent with the idea that they're actually going to be responsive to people who live paycheck to paycheck, to people who often have been overlooked. And time after time, the evidence is showing that the policy choices are undermining the vibrance of the economy and are overwhelmingly supporting big business over small ones. So that's
36:16 Speaker 05 what we have right now. But I hear you that there's clearly a disconnect between what is happening and what some of the rhetoric has been.
36:25 Speaker 04 I ask that as a follow up to the who do you mean by they question, because it does seem like in that case, you can't identify the they, right? You can say this is Elon Musk and Doge. This is a very tech oriented base of rich libertarian VCs who want to tear down the economy, who love to say they're doing first principles thinking, and they want to rebuild some sort of new crypto economy, whatever they want to do. And then there's the other side of it, which is here are all the actual people who just want better government services, and who thought the price of living would go down dramatically on day one. Do you sense as you look at the government now, as you talk to the people
37:06 Speaker 04 you're talking to, that the more populist wing will actually push back against this techno libertarian wing?
37:16 Speaker 05 That's really what a lot of us are wondering. I'm in the same camp as you is what will happen? You know, is this marriage between two different camps, is it really going to last? And there's obviously signs of strain already.
37:32 Speaker 04 Maybe the clearest lens for looking at this conflict is the Metta case. This is the antitrust case that began in 2020. It's going to trial next week. I've been saying to our team that this is the antitrust case that is most understandable for the most people. Everyone knows what Facebook is, everyone knows what Instagram is, and WhatsApp is, and they can easily form opinions about whether a single company should own all of those things. And at the same event where you appear with Steve Bannon, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson went on stage and said, sure, he'd obey a, quote, lawful order from the White House to drop that case if one came down, although he also said he didn't think that would happen. Then right next to that, there's the Justice Department's big antitrust case against Apple, which is a little harder to understand. People might benefit from Apple's closed ecosystem, and they might not understand that every time you tap a button to buy digital
38:15 Speaker 04 things on your phone, Apple gets a big cut, which is effectively a tax. That has become a big issue in Europe, which is heavily regulating Apple and what it can do with its stores. But it's a little more muted in the United States, even though this case is coming up. We saw Tim Cook donate a million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund. He was obviously sitting at the inauguration. He's presumably trying to negotiate with Trump about tariffs and antitrust, the same way Mark Zuckerberg is. How do you think that case is going to go in the Trump administration?
38:41 Speaker 05 It's hard to say, but the facts are worrisome. I think people really want the digital world to be more like an open ecosystem like the World Wide Web was in the earliest days, where no one really owned it. It was an open network. People could grab their real estate, sure, but they weren't going to be able to easily cut people off. But with mobile... We have now this power to really own the flow of money and information through control over the operating system or the device. And I think that is something across
39:24 Speaker 05 the globe that is gonna have to be addressed if we want to continue to have a really vibrant set of digital apps and services in our economy. And for me, there's no question, without the Microsoft Anitrust Action, there would not be Google, Amazon, Facebook, others. But I don't know how this will play out ultimately. But you're right, it does raise the question, is there going to be some sort of giveaway or some sort of cheap settlement that makes the problems go away?
40:00 Speaker 04 The other way you can look at it is that Apple is furious about the regulations it faces in the EU. Meta is furious about the fines it might be made to pay in the EU. You can see that the tech companies, they've tried to say to Trump, we need you to go fight the EU on behalf of American companies. That seems fine, like abstractly, it seems fine. It also seems like we're ending up in a position where we have a bunch of national champions in various parts of the economy, and that the American government needs to go fight for them on the world stage. And that seems dangerous in a different way. Do you think that's how it's gonna end up?
40:42 Speaker 05 That's what I'm worried about. It does feel, and I go back to those pardons that were issued at the CFPB. Who got them? How did they get them? Why were they given them? It does make me question whether we are drifting into a more European or more Chinese style system, where there's a clique of companies that the government goes to bat for, rather than looking for competition on the merits. I really thought that we
41:16 Speaker 05 Created so much in telecommunications and digital across sectors of the economy because we really wanted to make sure that little players could emerge and unseat the big guys. And I think that really is a big question right now. Are those large incumbents going to get special favors and sweetheart deals? And if they do, I think that's a real big problem. They're already making noise that in order to compete with China on AI, that they essentially need special favoritism.
41:54 Speaker 05 And I just think this is a recipe for moving our economy into one that is just not going to be growing in dynamic.
42:04 Speaker 04 The interests of the big tech companies do not align, even internally in the United States. And so I, I don't know how you can say to Apple, we will go fight the European Union on payments rules in exchange for you building a factory here and then turn right around and say to Meta, you still have to keep paying 30% on Apple's platforms, which is a thing you hate doing. Like Mark Zuckerberg is out there out loud saying, Apple's rules prevent me from building the kinds of products I want to build. And they're, they're a check on the digital economy that we could have if only I, Mark Zuckerberg, was allowed to build more stuff on iOS. And that's why he's building headsets, right? He wants to escape Apple's platforms and put the computer on your face.
42:46 Speaker 04 And I don't know if that's going to work, but even that alone, Apple saying, go fight the European Union for us on payments rules. Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to eat it domestically, does not seem tenable. And obviously you sat in the middle of these negotiations. All these companies were arguing with you very personally about a lot of these things. How did you see that misalignment play out?
43:07 Speaker 05 I think they all might hate each other. Sure, they all are jealous of each other's in some cases monopolies. Each of them have moats over different pieces of our digital ecosystem. They all have slightly different aspirations.
43:26 Speaker 05 But when it comes down to it, they are all trying to fight agencies that are enforcing the law against them. And they hire squadrons of lawyers, lobbyists, they hire the kids of politicians, and they really flex a lot of muscle. And we saw that very clearly at the inauguration of who got VIP seating. So even if they're at odds with each other, they're probably still going to row in the same direction when it comes to being held accountable under US law by these regulatory and enforcement agencies.
44:05 Speaker 04 Do you see any of our agencies having the will or the desire to enforce the law against the big tech companies right now?
44:13 Speaker 05 Well, it's going to require the courage and will of people to demand it. I mean, we really saw how when people were holding some of these agencies feet to the fire, they started actually acting. And we'll see if they actually go forward with some of these major cases. You know, the Microsoft case took, I think, decades. It was a lot of resolve. And in some ways, it was an imperfect result, but ultimately had a lot of payoff. But I do not want to see pardons and cheap settlements, which there's certainly a risk
44:58 Speaker 05 of that if there isn't the will to fix some of this.
45:03 Speaker 04 One of the things I see most of the big tech companies pushing towards is the idea that everyone will live in their own personalized economic bubble. You will open Instagram or TikTok, you will see AI-generated ads that are targeted specifically to you, and then you will pay individualized pricing because they will be able to calculate, or at least guess at how much you might be willing to pay. That might be different from how much someone else is able to pay. That seems, in terms of legibility, almost impossible to explain to people, right? That the internet that you experience, the commerce that you are partaking in is totally different than the person sitting right next to you on the same train, right? That your phone is a totally different economic experience than their
45:48 Speaker 04 phone, because you simply cannot see it. You have to see it at scale. That's coming. You can already see it in in different ways on different platforms.
45:59 Speaker 04 Do you think any there's any role for the government to regulate that? Do you think there's any mechanism for us to regulate that and at least make it legible to people?
46:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think this use of personalized pricing has to really have some speed bumps around it. We're essentially seeing the slow elimination of physical price tags that people have long been accustomed to. And every transaction is almost seeming more like negotiating at a car dealer, except you can't really negotiate. The price is personalized and it's based on a lot of information about us that we don't even expect the seller to know. We've all had the experience of it feels like ads are stalking us through the digital world. We search for something.
46:50 Speaker 05 Then we see the ad in a totally different device. But I really think this is a big, big threat of broad-based, individualized, surveillance-oriented pricing. And this is part of the reason why we were so focused at the CFPB on protecting financial privacy and people's payments information. We undertook a lot of investigation and research to understand how all of this payments information was being used by tech companies.
47:21 Speaker 04 Do you think America just needs to touch the stove? Right? We just need to burn it all down and get damaged and wake up and say, okay, these companies had too much power. We need to take it back.
47:31 Speaker 05 There will be moments, I think, obviously, the financial crisis, COVID, all of it created the conditions for people to rethink. And for people who were fed up to act, I don't know what that moment will be. But certainly, if there is another recession, if there is a mass doxing of Americans, if there is some other emergency, this could lead people to actually demand change from those who cast votes and sign bills into law.
48:10 Speaker 04 I'd like to thank Rohit for joining me on the show and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts about this episode or really anything else you want us to cover, you can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. Check them out. They're at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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