There has been a major security breach at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and some are blaming the Trump administration for this, pointing out the cancellation of IT security contracts. Yes, that’s concerning. Any data breach at any organization that has to do with people’s financial information is concerning. But there are a couple of things that the CFPB and its supporters, including the notorious Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose brainchild the CFPB was, aren’t mentioning.
President Donald Trump’s clampdown on the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau earlier this year has compounded IT security lapses at the agency through the cancellation of contracts, according to an audit report released on Monday.
The information security program at CFPB — which maintains sensitive and confidential data from investigations, the oversight of companies and complaints received from members of the public — is “not effective,” according to the Office of Inspector General, which also covers the Federal Reserve.
Representatives of the agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in a response to the report, CFPB management accepted its findings and proposed solutions which the report said would be adequate if implemented.
Note that there isn’t any particular indication as to how these security breaches happened, but there was also a pretty significant breach some time earlier, in 2023, in which people’s personal information might have been released. Remember, this was during the Biden administration.
The CFPB said an employee forwarded the personal information of more than a quarter-million consumers to a personal email account, an incident that the bureau described as a “major” breach.
The employee, who was fired when the data breach came to light, sent spreadsheets with names and transaction-specific account numbers related to those 256,000 consumer accounts at a single institution, according to the bureau. The CFPB did not identify the now former employee.
Whoops.
Read More: The Schumer Shutdown Is On – Why Is the CFPB Still at Work?
What Is Fintech, and Why Do Congressional Liberals Want to Crack Down on It?
Now, I’d call the release of the personal information of 250,000 people a pretty disconcerting event, and we give Politico some grudging credit for breaking the story, which much of the legacy media ignored. But there’s an obvious answer to these kinds of breaches.
Eliminate the CFPB.
This is an agency that shouldn’t exist. There is no constitutional authorization for this function, which a plain reading of the 10th Amendment would indicate that it shouldn’t exist. In fact, it would indicate that its existence is unconstitutional, although in that sense, you can add it to a long, long list of the things that the federal government does. We got along very well without it before 2011. We could get along just as well without it after 2025. The CFPB has been plagued with trouble from its outset, from the aforementioned data breach (a screw-up on the part of an employee) to harassment and discrimination scandals.
Every operation that handles this kind of sensitive data is a potential source of leaks, lapses, intrusions, or just plain screw-ups. The CFPB is one such agency that is accomplishing nothing worthwhile, an agency that shouldn’t even exist, and an agency plagued with problems. It’s time for Congress to defund it and to repeal the legislation that gave rise to it. That will fix the data security problems at CFPB, once and for all.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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