DOGE’s ‘god-tier’ access to CFPB data opens door to market manipulation, experts say

The Department of Government Efficiency’s access to vast amounts of data stored at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) puts financial institutions at risk and potentially exposes details about law enforcement investigations, trade secrets and other exceptionally sensitive corporate proprietary information stored at the agency.

A CFPB data leak could severely damage companies’ reputations and hurt their ability to compete with rivals, former officials and experts say.

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. 

Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs invited Meyer to give a closed door briefing on February 13 and expressed concern about DOGE’s access to the agency’s data, 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.

The agency has historically exchanged data with other law enforcement agencies, she said, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

“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.”

CFPB, an independent agency, did not respond to a request for comment.

Industry alarm

Industry contacts who are nervous about DOGE access and the possibility of leaks have been in touch with Meyer, she said.

Yet the financial industry has been notably quiet in public about CFPB’s data vulnerability. Trade associations representing banks, credit unions, payment systems and the securities industry either did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment for this story. Many top executives at firms in these sectors supported President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

Nonetheless, companies have privately expressed significant concerns about CFPB data security under DOGE, according to a former agency official who now advises financial institutions and requested anonymity to discuss client interests.

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.

“Typically, anyone seeing this data would have gone through rigorous ethics vetting, followed by privacy training, security training and very tightly managed access controls,” the source said. “There's not much confidence I have that any of that's being followed. … It’s sort of inevitable that some of the data will leak out.”

A former senior CFPB official also emphasized the sensitivity of the agency’s data at a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday focused on the agency.

“We have information on the secret sauce of the credit models that people have built with artificial intelligence to make decisions about whether you get a loan or not,” Lorelei Salas, who resigned from her position as the CFPB’s director of supervision policy on February 11, told the committee.

“All of that very sensitive trade secret information is within our systems.” 

Salas also told Congress she’s worried the agency’s “randomly terminated” IT and cybersecurity contracts make its data more vulnerable to hackers. As of February 11, the agency had cancelled more than $100 million in vendor contracts, an Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told Bloomberg Law.

Agency responsibilities

The agency’s remit over broad swaths of the economy makes its data especially sensitive.

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.

Conflict of interest

DOGE’s access to the data also potentially harms companies that compete with Musk’s numerous business interests, experts say. 

Musk has been hostile to the agency, worrying former officials. “RIP CFPB,” he posted on his personal X account earlier this month, next to an emoji of a tombstone.

Musk has business interests in the automotive industry (Tesla), the medical field (Neuralink), the defense sector (Starlink) and the space technology industry (SpaceX) — all industries that could have confidential interactions with financial institutions.

Musk is also reportedly building a digital payment system for X.

“Musk can now root through all of the CFPB confidential data that DOGE has accessed on these potential competitors,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said at the Tuesday hearing.

CFPB has been sued by or issued enforcements against some of those competitors, including PayPal and Cash App, Salas said, and is storing confidential data belonging to them and other digital wallet companies it supervises. 

“If I were a company in the same competitive space as an X payment system, I would be super worried — there's a massive competitive advantage with all this trade secret information that the CFPB has,” Wu said. 

On Thursday, Warren and several members of the House announced they are investigating whether DOGE staffers are sharing classified information over insecure networks, citing findings from security researchers who concluded the group’s website is not hosted on protected government servers.

The lawmakers also pointed to DOGE’s connecting an unauthorized server to federal networks, alleging the entity’s failings are “inexcusable and raise additional questions about DOGE employees’ access to highly sensitive personal and national security information, and what they are doing with it.”