Elon Musk on Wednesday called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that was founded in 2010 with a broad mandate to protect Americans from unfair and predatory financial practices.

“Delete CFPB,” Musk wrote in an X post Wednesday morning, calling the Federal Reserve-funded agency an example of “too many duplicative regulatory agencies” in the federal government. That reasoning has been questioned by numerous experts, who note that the CFPB was founded precisely because none of the overlapping financial watchdogs at the time focused on consumer protection.

“But there’s no reason to think facts or evidence have anything to do with Musk’s views,” Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Asking the world’s richest person, with a direct interest in a wide range of business lines, to run a project to review the federal government’s overall operations is […]