Erie Meyer, former agency chief technologist and senior adviser, told Recorded Future News that workers on Elon Musk’s DOGE team were given broad access to the agency. She recalled five young DOGE team members roaming a secure executive suite at CFPB in early February, trying to enter locked offices. She resigned the next day.
Despite the team’s lack of government experience, the data privileges given to them are “god-tier” and “spooky,” she said.
According to a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union against acting CFPB Director Russell Vought, the team gained access to all non-classified CFPB databases on February 7.
Under normal circumstances, often only a single CFPB employee would have need-to-know access to customer acquisition data, revenues and profits numbers and other non-public information stored at the agency, Meyer said. CFPB also collects and stores financial transaction data and business plans.
“Publicly traded companies like Meta have disclosed in SEC filings that they are under investigation by the CFPB for how they’re using personal financial data from third parties in their advertising business,” Meyer said.
“I’m concerned about market manipulation if unauthorized people have ‘god-tier’ access to these and other investigatory records and data.”
The lack of transparency about what special government employees may be doing with the data and how it is being secured has caught the attention of financial institutions, the source said. There’s a possibility that DOGE employees could even be tipping off friends at competitive businesses about proprietary information, the source added.
The CFPB supervises depository institutions with $10 billion or more in assets such as banks, thrifts and credit unions. It also has authority over mortgage originators and servicers, payday and private student lenders and oversees consumer reporting, debt collection and foreclosure, student loan servicing, international money transfer and automobile financing.
It routinely inspects banks’ activities and procedures, said Chi Chi Wu, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.
Many times financial institutions are investigated by CFPB but are ultimately found to not have acted improperly, Wu said. An investigation becoming public could impact stock prices and embarrass companies in ways that could be destructive, she added.
“Even if we don’t think of banks as consumers, it is a data privacy issue,” Wu said. “If I were a bank, I would be horrified and on the phone yelling right now.”
Firms regulated by CFPB should be worried that data that is “pretty core to the viability and profitability of your company is in the hands of Elon Musk and anyone else that he wants to share it with,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group
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