How DOGE’s Targeting of CFPB and HUD Really Impacts Real Estate

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It seems like almost everyone has a strong opinion on the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that fits in with the partisan divisions that have become so prominent in our society today. Some have even gone so far as to set Tesla cars on fire. Personally, though, I’m rather ambivalent.

For one, the U.S. government is clearly bloated, spending $6.9 trillion per year as of 2024, with enormous amounts of waste and cronyism. On the other hand, it is an undeniably bad look to have the richest man in the world leading a group that’s firing thousands of people. The host of overblown and exaggerated claims coming from DOGE hasn’t helped either. 

The biggest effect DOGE could have on the housing market is by far its face-off with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to HUD’s Trump-appointed Secretary, there are $260 million in cuts coming, and some reports claim that as much as 50% of HUD’s workforce could be laid off.

While such an action would certainly save taxpayers money, it could also result in a variety of problems, including delays in Section 8’s (already slow) payments. For more about this political fight and the consequences it could have for real estate investors, please see Jeff Vasishta’s excellent article here on BiggerPockets.

DOGE’s Many Targets

DOGE’s first major target was USAID. While admittedly USAID does provide important services to poor nations, the agency has also wasted a lot of money in a sometimes absurd fashion, including $2 million for pottery classes in Morocco, $20 million to make a Sesame Street-like show in Iraq, $2 million to help fund gender transitions in Guatemala, and $1 million for the lab in Wuhan where COVID-19 very well might have leaked from. 

Moreover, USAID has a dark underside. One of its primary beneficiaries is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In fact, the NED received about 90% of its $3 billion budget from USAID in 2023, making it a de facto government agency.  And the government agency it resembles most is the Central Intelligence Agency. As the NED’s cofounder Allen Weinstein put it, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

For anyone who’s wondering, the CIA doesn’t exactly have a good history of supporting democracy. 

Indeed, the NED has been caught meddling in multiple countries’ internal politics and supporting numerous color revolutions since its founding. Perhaps this is worthwhile, but in the humble opinion of this author, the U.S. government has no business interfering in the politics of foreign nations in this way and certainly shouldn’t be doing it on the taxpayers’ dime.

Unfortunately, DOGE hasn’t done much to go after corporate welfare or the bloated military budget. But it’s also important to recognize that not all taxpayer money is so poorly spent. And one of DOGE’s more recent targets would save little money and could genuinely harm consumers, as well as real estate investors. 

DOGE vs. the Consumer Financial Protection Board

Thus, we turn to DOGE’s battle with the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), the brainchild of left-wing Senator Elizabeth Warren that was founded in 2011 in the wake of the real estate collapse and financial crisis. DOGE almost immediately put the CFPB in its sights, and on Feb. 10, the Trump administration stopped work at the CFPB. A court injunction prevented the agency from being shut down for now, but as of this writing, its future is very much in doubt.

While initially, this should seem like a clear-cut case of a partisan disagreement, remember that Trump ran as a populist, so ending a consumer protection agency shouldn’t necessarily fit with his ostensible agenda.

Furthermore, the CFPB’s annual budget is just $823 million as of fiscal year 2023, and it has a staff of under 1,700. This may sound like a lot, but with a federal budget of $6.8 trillion in 2024, it’s mere peanuts in savings. 

There are certainly some legitimate criticisms of the CFPB. For one, it is well known that excessive regulation can reduce economic growth. Regulation also tends to hurt smaller firms more than bigger ones, given the larger relative compliance costs.

Another criticism is that the CFPB has tended to be reactive. It has stopped some abuses and punished offenders, but it has not stopped a major scandal from occurring. 

But by far the most legitimate critique is that the CFPB is not subject to congressional budget approval, which gives it a lot of power to act without much oversight to restrain it. This could definitely lead to political bias, especially given it was set up by leading Democrats, as well as the ability to abuse its power.

That being said, such a problem could easily be remedied with reform. How about legislation to make the CFPB answerable to Congress instead of simply ending it? After all, when you look at what the CFPB has done, it’s hard to argue with much of it:

That last one is noteworthy, as the Senate just voted to lift the cap on bank overdraft fees. I try not to be too political in these articles and have certainly criticized the Democrats before, but I sincerely doubt even a tiny fraction of Trump’s base were voting for banks to be able to gouge them more if they accidentally overdraw their account.

On a more speculative note, I believe some of the DOGE’s hostility toward the CFPB comes from Elon Musk’s friend Marc Andreessen (who has a dubious history in the crypto space). Andreessen vehemently complained about the CFPB before the election:

“…we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control. And it’s an independent agency that gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as independent agency, and yet there it is… 

“…This is where a lot of the debanking comes from these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.”

He then gives the example of rapper Kanye West (who was debanked, but by the banks themselves, not by the CFPB). 

For one, since most of the federal government isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, I see no reason to single out the CFPB. There is also no evidence the CFPB is Elizabeth Warren’s “personal agency.” Nor have I been able to find anything about the CFPB debanking individuals or companies other than some regulatory proposals regarding crypto.

This is, of course, not to say that debanking is not an issue. It most certainly is. There very well may be some problems with debanking in the fintech space. But moreover, political dissidents, in particular, can be targeted, which has serious ramifications for free speech. The ability of powerful government agencies or private institutions to effectively remove someone’s ability to participate in the economy is rather terrifying, and I think it justifies the overused term “Orwellian.” 

But the CFPB is not the culprit. In fact, here’s what its former head of the CFPB, Rohit Chopra, said on the subject:

“Lots of people are losing their accounts, and, in some cases, are put on an industrywide blacklist, preventing them from opening accounts elsewhere… [banks] should only have the ability to [close accounts] when there is some reasonable business justification or a very clear law or regulation that they are following.”

My personal take is that the crypto space has come under increasing scrutiny after the collapse of FTX and the growing number of pump-and-dump scams. And this added scrutiny is not something Andreessen wants, given Andreessen-Horowitz’s investment in crypto. Andreessen’s animosity then likely rubbed off on Musk and, through Musk, DOGE. But that is, admittedly, speculation.

How Ending the CFPB Could Affect Real Estate

The CFPB was created in the wake of a real estate crash, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it oversees and enforces several real estate-related regulations. The most noteworthy is the RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act). This act requires a variety of disclosures and prohibits kickbacks, referral fees, and the like. Most of these disclosures seem unhelpful to me, but the most they add is a hassle.

More importantly, the CFPB also enforces Regulation Z (also called the Truth in Lending Act), which requires lenders to disclose the actual APR (annual percentage rate) of any loan. The APR takes into account the fees and costs of closing the loan and makes it harder for bad actors to pull one over on sophisticated borrowers.

That being said, ending the CFPB will not end either RESPA or Regulation Z; it will simply change who enforces those statutes. It could reduce enforcement, but that is speculative. 

The CFPB has also made a proposal to help homeowners avoid foreclosure by prioritizing assistance and other such actions. I have long thought the best thing the federal and state governments could do to reduce the number of foreclosures and evictions is to provide support for those struggling to make payments. But with the CFPB in DOGE’s crosshairs, this proposal is unlikely to go anywhere.

In the future, the CFPB could potentially decide to go after housing in a variety of other ways, some harmful. There have been a lot of local actions taken against property owners that have mostly been harmful, so this wouldn’t be surprising. 

One possibility is it could try to cap late fees for delinquent rent. Of course, there should be a cap of some sort on that. However, regulatory agencies have a long history of going too far on such things, and this should really be a local and state issue. But that is all conjecture. The CFPB had not made any such moves up to the date of this writing.

Indeed, the biggest effect removing the CFPB could have for real estate investors is likely indirect. Americans are being pinched hard right now financially, and ending some of the CFPB’s protections could exacerbate that. Housing affordability—both for renters and homeowners—is as bad as it’s ever been. Allowing overdraft fees to balloon and malicious payday lenders to charge exorbitant rates to unqualified borrowers is just going to make the problem even worse, particularly for the poorest among us.

And many such people rent from us investors here at BiggerPockets. While delinquency rates have decreased since the pandemic ended, many renters are still strapped. These changes could push some of them into delinquency. 

Others are trying to buy their first house hack, and every bit helps when saving up for that. Getting gouged with petty fees makes that just a little bit harder. 

So wh,ile the direct effect on the real estate industry of ending the CFPB will likely be rather small, the indirect effects could be fairly negative. And the effect on the country almost certainly will be. The Consumer Financial Protection Board should be reformed to be more accountable to Congress, but it should be removed from DOGE’s chopping block and stick around.