Imagine a rule under which your private financial data — from paycheck deposits to credit card transactions — can be extracted, shared, or sold without your clear consent, all under the guise of “consumer protection.” That’s exactly what the Biden administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has done — and President Trump must stop it in its tracks.
In a final act of bureaucratic overreach, the Biden CFPB, led by Big Tech-aligned ideologue Rohit Chopra, finalized a rule under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act that forces banks, credit unions, and financial institutions to hand over customer data — not just to consumers, but to data-hungry third parties. Chopra’s rule is a Trojan horse: sold as “consumer access,” but structured as a giveaway to the tech elite. It benefits Silicon Valley firms that want to mine, sell, and manipulate your financial life — all while hiding behind buzzwords like “open banking.”
Let’s be clear: Section 1033 was never intended to turn American citizens into data farms for billion-dollar tech firms.
These companies aren’t hungry for consumer empowerment — they’re hungry for data. They want to fuel surveillance capitalism and train AI models with your personal information. And Chopra’s rule hands them the keys.
Under the Biden CFPB, consumer data is stripped of meaningful consent protections, transferred without clear liability rules, and made available to third-party aggregators that are barely regulated. These middlemen aren’t your trusted neighborhood bank or credit union. They’re digital scavengers — scraping, storing, and monetizing data with impunity.
Meanwhile, traditional banks and credit unions — which operate under tight regulatory oversight and robust cybersecurity mandates — are expected to share this data at their own expense, with no say in where it goes or how it’s secured. That’s not innovation. That’s exploitation.
President Trump must draw a red line: no rulemaking that mimics or carries forward Chopra’s radical overreach.
Any future action under Section 1033 must be tightly confined to the statute Congress enacted, with the CFPB operating squarely within those legal boundaries. Before moving forward, the bureau should coordinate with the Federal Trade Commission and banking regulators rather than impose unilateral mandates. Access should be limited to genuine consumers — not extended to fintechs or data brokers — and any rule must prioritize security, preventing parties that are not held to bank-level cybersecurity standards from harvesting financial data. Policy should encourage innovation without penalizing banks: market participants, including banks and tech firms, ought to be free to negotiate fees and agreements rather than be subject to one-size-fits-all mandates. Finally, liability must be clear and enforced: anyone who leaks or misuses data must be held accountable.
Above all, the Trump CFPB should ban screen scraping, a primitive and dangerous form of data extraction that fintech firms still use to vacuum up sensitive consumer data. This isn’t progress — it’s digital looting.
We must not allow Big Tech to hide behind the language of “consumer empowerment” while turning Main Street Americans into digital products. If these companies want access to our data, they should play by the same rules, face the same liability, and secure it with the same vigilance demanded of banks.
Section 1033 was written to empower consumers — not enrich Silicon Valley and not subsidize woke corporations that already censor speech, control narratives, and now want access to your financial life.
This is a moment for President Trump to lead boldly: to protect privacy, to stand with working Americans, not elite tech firms, and to defend Main Street, not surveil it.
Mr. President, don’t let the Deep State CFPB weaponize data against the very Americans you’ve vowed to protect.