Recent hires at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are making it increasingly unclear what exactly the Trump administration is planning for the beleaguered bureau.

The CFPB was created in 2010 to protect consumers from fraud, as well as abusive and deceptive practices by financial institutions. It has the power to sue and fine companies. But many Republicans and conservatives maintain the bureau has overstepped its authority.

While repeatedly working to undermine, defund and even eliminate the CFPB, Trump officials are now beefing up the bureau’s administration ranks. On Wednesday, it was announced that Mark Calabria, the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) during President Donald Trump’s first term, had taken on an interim position at the CFPB.

News reports have said that Calabria will hold a key position in the bureau until Jonathan McKernan, Trump’s choice to run the bureau, is confirmed as the CFPB’s permanent director. Calabria, a past senior adviser to the Cato Institute and a new employee at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is known for his experience in financial regulation and overseeing the nation’s housing finance system.

Also in recent days, Jeffrey Clark was appointed as senior adviser to Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s new chief legal officer. Clark is a close Trump ally and the former acting assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s environment and natural resources division during Trump’s first term.

Clark was a staunch defender of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and was even identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the election. He was nearly disbarred in Washington, D.C., because of his efforts. Clark was also indicted along with 18 other people in the prosecution related to the attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. That case is currently on hold.

More recently, Clark has been a senior fellow and director of litigation at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank founded by Trump’s OMB director Russell Vought. It is Vought who is credited with being one of the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which aims to advance conservative policies and reshape the federal government so that more power is placed with the executive branch.

It is not clear what policies this group would want to promote at the CFPB, especially considering various members of Trump’s administration have spoken openly about eliminating the consumer protection agency altogether. Currently, the CFPB remains shut down and its homepage is not functioning at the direction of Vought, who ran the bureau for a brief time in early February after the firing of former Director Rohit Chopra. Vought has also written online about his wish to cut off all funding to the bureau.

Trump adviser Elon Musk, who is also involved with the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, has repeatedly criticized the bureau, calling for it to be deleted. He even recently posted “CFPB RIP” with a tombstone emoji on his social media site X.