House Republicans on Tuesday are expected to join their Senate colleagues in advancing a resolution that would roll back a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule designed to protect the American public from scammers on digital payment platforms, a move that watchdog groups say would personally benefit President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
The House resolution, led by Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.), targets a CFPB rule that was finalized shortly after the November election, in the waning days of the Biden administration. The CFPB said at the time that the rule would help ensure that companies offering digital payment services "follow federal law just like large banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions."
But the CFPB is now led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, who has halted virtually all of the agency's work while Musk's Department of Government Efficiency overtakes the bureau, looking to gut it from the inside.
With their effort to rescind the CFPB's digital payments rule, congressional Republicans are aiding Musk's assault on the CFPB and delivering a major win for his push into financial services with X Money. The Senate voted mostly along party lines to rescind the rule last week.
"This is a gift to Big Tech and likely the personal finances of Trump and Musk themselves," Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement as the GOP-led House Financial Services Committee took up the resolution. "These companies process over 13 billion transactions a year, and millions of Americans are relying on them for safe and secure payments."
"Allowing companies like Apple, PayPal, and X Money to avoid federal laws creates a blind spot for rampant financial abuse and fraud," Carrk added.
Accountable.US noted in a recent report that both Trump and Musk stand to benefit financially from efforts to gut the CFPB and eliminate rules enacted under the Biden administration.
"Last year, Trump Media & Technology Group filed a trademark to create a broad financial services platform Truth.Fi," the group observed. "The products and services they said they would perform included the creation of a 'downloadable computer software' that serves as a 'digital wallet' to store and trade cryptocurrencies as well as a digital payments processing platform for purchases made with cryptocurrencies."
That initiative and Musk's X Money would fall under the purview of the rule that congressional Republicans are poised to roll back.
In a CNNappearance on Monday, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said that Musk and other powerful corporate executives are "fixated" on the consumer bureau because it is "responsible for monitoring all of those tech companies for how they're moving our money to protect against privacy errors and fraud."