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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, November 14th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that has a very basic question for conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro, after he made this observation on his show on Thursday. 

[clip of Ben Shapiro] So yesterday, after the House of Representatives reopened, Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona became the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition. She joined all the other Democrats, as well as four Republicans, including two who hate President Trump and would like to destroy his presidency. That would be Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace. 

Jane Coaston: Why would releasing the Epstein files, as promised by FBI director Kash Patel last year and as requested by Vice President J.D. Vance on numerous occasions, destroy President Donald Trump’s presidency? Hmm. [music break] On today’s show, the Department of Justice takes California to court over what it calls racial gerrymandering, something that’s totally unacceptable unless you’re Texas, in which case, carry on. And the Trump administration points to a surprising culprit behind America’s health care costs, obese visa applicants? But let’s start with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. This week, a court filing showed that the Trump Administration has declared the current funding structure for the CFPB to be illegal. The agency was created in the wake of the global financial crisis to protect consumers and collect their complaints. Typically, it gets its money from the Federal Reserve. But now, the Justice Department has decided that the CFPB can only be funded if the Federal Reserve is operating at a surplus, which it isn’t. I don’t know if you’ll be able to believe this, but the CFPB has been in the Trump administration’s crosshair since Trump took office in January. Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, who is currently acting director of the CFPB, because foxes are amazing at guarding henhouses, ordered employees of the agency to stop working back in February, and has said repeatedly that he wants to see the CFPB close its doors. Here’s former CFPB director Rohit Chopra speaking to PBS in February. 

[clip of Rohit Chopra] I really think defunding this type of oversight is just begging for another financial crisis. 

Jane Coaston: And Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, also ran roughshod through the agency earlier this year, cutting around 90% of its staff. Consumers love the CFPB, which has spent the last decade and a half cutting overdraft fees on bank accounts and working with everyday Americans bearing the brunt of nonstop scams and junk fees. But big business, as you might be able to imagine, hates the agency, which Vought described in a February tweet as, quote, “A woke and weaponized agency against disfavorite industries and individuals.” Yes. Pity the poor banking industry. This latest news comes as it seems we’re all receiving more scam texts and emails and phone calls than ever before. From texts about fake USPS packages to posts about fake cryptocurrency to calls about fake basically everything else. And the Trump administration has apparently decided that that’s fine. So to talk more about the Trump administration taking another ax to the CFPB and what we do now, I spoke to David Dayen, executive editor of the public policy magazine, The American Prospect. David, welcome to What a Day. 

David Dayen: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: So for anyone who isn’t familiar, what are the main functions of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? 

David Dayen: Sure. So, this is an agency that was started in 2010. It’s, prior to that, consumer protection regulations, whether it’s about mortgages, or student loans, or auto loans, or anything that is a major financial transaction in the economy, those regulations were spread out across a number of different agencies. And the goal of the CFPB was to put them all in one agency with the sole mission of protecting consumers, no other sort of countervailing ideas that were involved. And it’s been quite successful until about February of this year. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, you wrote about this that a legal filing this week revealed that the Trump administration has decided that the CFPB’s funding mechanism is illegal because it wants to block the CFPB from receiving funding from the Federal Reserve. Can you explain the legal argument that the White House is attempting here? 

David Dayen: Yeah, this is a hack argument that has been put together for years now and most courts have just sort of dismissed it, but it’s coming up again. And here’s the concept. So the way that the CFPB is funded is, and this is in the statute, it says it comes from the earnings of the Federal Reserve Board. So at the time that CFPB was established, the Fed was making tons of money basically for a lot of different reasons, but it had a very large balance sheet with a lot of interest-bearing securities on its books. That has changed, and since 2022, the Fed has actually lost money. And so, what the government is saying is that, well, the the Fed is losing money, and therefore, it doesn’t have any earnings, and therefore the CFPB can’t take money out of the Fed because there are no earnings it can take it from. It’s very, very specific kind of textual reading. And to believe this argument, you have to believe that when Congress established the CFPB, it was thinking that we would only regulate consumer protection in years that the Federal Reserve turns a profit. That somehow those things would  be tied together. And in years where the Federal Reserve didn’t turn a profit, oh well, you’re gonna get scammed on your mortgage. This is a ridiculous argument, and I just can’t see a judge saying, you know what, you are right. Legally speaking, there’s no way for consumer protection to go on unless the Federal reserve is a money making operation. And so we’re we’re just gonna let you go with that. My my suspicion is that they will say, no, you actually have to ask the Federal Reserve for the money. 

Jane Coaston: I mean, this filing is new to you and I, but the effort by the Trump administration to dismantle the CFPB is not new. This has been going on basically since Trump took office in January. And I know this seems like kind of an obvious point, but why do they want to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? 

David Dayen: I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons Republicans have been against this agency from the very beginning. They don’t want a consumer protection agency that has such a fundamental sole mission. Uh they are you know some of their supporters are in the banking industry and the banking industry doesn’t like the CFPB. Um. But you know just take that one step further. One of the things that the sort of new right tech industry is interested in is using their platforms as payment mechanisms. So Elon Musk wants to turn X into the everything app. And one of the thing he wants to do is have it be sort of a financial app that you can you know make payments and move things from one place to the other. Um. What they really don’t want is the CFPB to regulate them for that. Um, and so right before the election and, and shortly thereafter, you saw all these people like Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk go after CFPB specifically, um, because under Rohit Chopra who was the previous director in the Biden administration, they were looking at these non-bank participants like, uh, Facebook, like Google, like, potentially Twitter/X to uh see if they needed enhanced regulation if they were going to be getting into the financial system. So i think that it’s the combination of generally Republicans side with the big banks over consumers and uh this this new wrinkle of you know uh silicon valley wanting to become banks. 

Jane Coaston: Now I don’t know if you’ve gotten a lot more phishing texts from alleging that you have a toll due in a state you’ve never lived in. And it comes from like a plus four four area code, you know, like an American–

David Dayen: Normal stuff. Yeah.

Jane Coaston: –pla–, you know would. But online financial scams have seemingly become even more endemic than they were before. Would a functional CFPB be able to protect consumers who lose money in these types of scams? Because it’s all kinds of scamps. It’s these toll scams. It’s fake jobs. Like where you get those texts being like, hey, we’re going to pay you $8,000 a month to do two hours of work. And it’s like, not a real thing. 

David Dayen: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Would the CFPB in a better time be able to protect consumers against that? 

David Dayen: Yeah, Jane, you say you’re not driving much in São Tomé and Príncipe? Or places like that?

Jane Coaston: It’s I don’t it’s it’s weird how I am not a big Filipino highway driver. 

David Dayen: Right, it is weird. Um. Yeah, so I would say, first of all, the CFPB is sort of an agency in name only right now. Um. Even though Russ Vought has been unsuccessful in firing most of the workers, he has basically told them not to do any work. And so it’s it’s there’s it’s this agency where people just, they don’t even come into the office and they just sort of sit around at home all day and then not a lot goes on. And so scams are proliferating throughout the economy. Now, some of this is because of the Trump administration’s general attitude towards consumer protection. Some of these things that you talked about have to do with the Federal Trade Commission, for example, um but certainly financial scams are moving on up the ladder. And we’re in a situation right now where the debt levels uh and delinquency levels in particular in things like mortgages, student loans, auto loans are at levels that they were at just around the financial crisis of 2008 and to not have an agency to not have a cop on the beat uh while this massive amount of debt this debt bomb is growing and growing growing is really really dangerous for people.

Jane Coaston: Yeah, you said 2008, and I said, no, mm mm no thank you. Let’s not do that again. But it’s interesting because this week, Google filed a lawsuit targeting a network in China called Lighthouse, which Google alleges is providing digital support to a vast network of scammers. But we also saw some reporting from Reuters talking about how Meta was well aware that roughly 10% of its revenue was coming from scams. So with the hollowing out of the CFPB, how much could consumers rely on tech companies like Google to police itself and protect against scams. 

David Dayen: I mean, this is one of the big problems, right? I mean self-regulation really doesn’t work at all. If and certainly not in platforms that are trying to make as much money as they can because they need to build out the AI revolution or whatever. So um yeah, I think it’s a time when people have to be really on guard with the knowledge that there’s not really anybody at least at the federal level, who’s really protecting them. Now some states have stepped up, California and New York and some others, um but by and large, uh there is a big hole, big smoking hole in our consumer financial regulatory structure right now. And clearly by their actions, Russ Vought and the Trump administration want that to be sort of a permanent condition. 

Jane Coaston: How could the recent deal to end the shutdown complicate the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to end the CFPB and fire everyone who works there? 

David Dayen: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So one of the few bright spots in the legislation in terms of a concession that the Trump administration made is this part of the shutdown resolution that says that no individual federal employees or at least in a mass sense and a reduction in force sense can be fired. And so now we’re in a situation where, let’s say you know, CFPB has said they have enough money until the end of the year, but in early 2026, they would run out of money if they are correct that they’re not allowed to get any more money from the Fed. So let’s say it’s January 2026 and CFPB runs out of money, but they’re not allowed to fire anybody because of this provision in the shutdown resolution so what do they do? They have they have to fund these people they have to keep these people employed they have to pay these people but they say they can’t get any money so it’s this huge dilemma that’s is going to come to a head probably in the courts. 

Jane Coaston: David, thank you so much for joining me. 

David Dayen: Great, thank you very much. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Kevin Hasett] And the household survey wasn’t conducted in October. So we’re gonna get half the employment report. We’ll get the jobs part, but we won’t get the unemployment rate. And that’ll just be for one month. 

Jane Coaston: White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Thursday that the government will still release October’s jobs report, but without an unemployment rate thanks to the weeks-long shutdown. The record 43-day shutdown halted data collection, processing, and publication across key federal agencies, including the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis. But Hassett doesn’t just quit when the going gets tough. 

[clip of Kevin Hasett] But yeah, it is true that we probably will will never, we’ll maybe be able to concoct something that we’ll never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October. 

Jane Coaston: Concoct something? That’s not how numbers work. The October jobs report is not a witch’s brew. Hassett told reporters that the shutdown cost roughly $15 billion a week and shaved 1% to 1.5% off economic growth, eliminating an estimated 60,000 private sector jobs. The data gap comes as the BLS still has no Senate-confirmed director after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer earlier this year over disappointing July jobs numbers. His chosen replacement, E.J. Antony, was nominated and then quickly withdrawn. At this point, maybe Trump and Hassett should skip concocting the unemployment rate and start concofting a BLS director. The Justice Department has sued to block new congressional district boundaries approved by California voters. It joins a court battle that could play a huge role in which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026. The complaint filed Thursday targets the congressional map pushed by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and approved by California Voters last week. Proposition 50 is a constitutional amendment temporarily changing the congressional boundaries. The aim is to give California Democrats a chance in next year’s midterms to win five seats that are currently held by Republicans. And to be clear, it’s literally just a response to a similar Republican-led effort in Texas, backed by none other than Trump himself. Republicans there have rejiggered districts in hopes of picking up five seats of their own ahead of the midterms. If Texas can do it, why can’t California? The Trump administration, now clearly feeling threatened, joined the California Republican Party in challenging the state’s new map. The DOJ is accusing California of racial gerrymandering and is asking a judge to prohibit the state from using the map in any future elections. Governor Newsom’s press office said in a tweet, quote, “these losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court.” 

[clip of Kristi Noem] So today we are announcing that we are going to be handing out bonus checks of ten thousand dollars to TSOs, to agents who work for TSA who served with exemplary service. 

Jane Coaston: On Thursday, Secretary of Homeland Security and Omnipresent Airport Specter, Kristi Noem, handed out $10,000 bonus checks to select Transportation Security Administration agents who worked through the record-long government shutdown. Standing in front of a dozen TSA agents at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Noem said the payments were meant to help workers, quote, “get back on their feet after more than six weeks without pay.” Noem praised TSA Agents who, quote, “showed up each and every day.” Noem then went on to hand out physical checks to TSA agents. “So with that, Rico, I want to present to you a check and say thank you from the American people. Appreciate it.” Bearing in mind that’s the first time Noem has said thank you and Rico in the same sentence, no one knows how many workers will actually get checks or the full criteria DHS used to pick them, other than them being within arm’s reach when Noem spotted a camera. New guidance from the Trump administration instructs visa officers to, quote, “consider an applicant’s health, like whether or not they are obese, when deciding whether to issue U.S. Visas to foreigners.” That’s according to a State Department message sent out last week and seen by multiple outlets. The directive reinterprets public charge, which determines if foreigners can be denied visas if they’re likely to rely on U. S. Government assistance. While federal law already required those seeking permanent residency or legal status to prove they wouldn’t be a public charge. The new guidelines appear to go even further. According to KFF Health News, the cable mentions medical conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, and diabetes, and notes that they can, quote, “require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of care.” The guidelines also encourage visa officers to consider whether an applicant is obese, noting that obesity can cause asthma, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure. But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by the new rules. A State Department Spokesperson told Axios quote, “It’s no secret the Trump administration is putting the interests of the American people first, adding, quote, “This includes enforcing policies that ensure our immigration system is not a burden on the American taxpayer.” A taxpayer who is, let’s be real here, more likely than not to be obese. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, enjoy a Russian AI robot falling down during its big debut, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, I’m not just about Aidol, Russia’s first humanoid robot, keeling over this week in a manner familiar to anyone who has ever fallen up the stairs. Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and yes, AI robots might kill us all, but first they need to hash out walking. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Byrd, Caitlin Plummer, Tyler Hill, and Ethan Overman. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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