Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, delivered the following opening statement during a full Committee hearing entitled, “Oversight of Prudential Regulators.”

Thank you very much Mr. Chairman.

Vice Chair Barr, Chair Grueneberg, Chair Harper and Acting Comptroller Hsu, I want to thank each of you and all of your hardworking government employees for the great work you’ve done to strengthen our nation’s financial system coming out of the pandemic. It is much more difficult to build something strong, as each of you have done, than it is to basically tear something down. I’m concerned about what the next four years will bring.

Trump promised the American people that he would bring down inflation and strengthen the economy, but Matt Gaetz – a man investigated by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking and the subject of a lawsuit, not to mention a supposedly scathing Ethics Committee report – is Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department. While my Republican colleagues have demanded that the FDIC Chair resign and released a report late last night about the cultural problems at the agency, they have been eerily silent about Matt Gaetz’s candidacy. To be clear, Matt Gaetz is accused of having sex with a 17-year-old girl, taking this 17-year-old girl across state lines for sex, and paying this 17-year-old girl for sex. All of these are crimes. But where are the calls for his nomination to be withdrawn?

Let me just say that Chair Gruenberg indicated that he’s leaving. But no, that’s not enough for you. You said ‘immediately.’ What do you want him to do? Get out of his seat now and walk out of the door?

No one on this Committee should be okay with a sex trafficker running the Department of Justice. But I’m not just concerned about the Department of Justice. I’m concerned about our nation’s consumers under a new Trump administration. Elon Musk, the co-president and the richest person on planet Earth, has pushed his way into a highly influential government role and now stands to personally make billions more from his access to the levers of government, while he guts the government’s tools that protect working class Americans.

But, I guess if you’re rich and you’re co-president you can get away with it. We know what the future holds: Trump and his appointees will seek to gut guardrails that keep Wall Street, megabanks, and crypto in check. They will rubber stamp bank mergers to allow big banks to get even bigger and give a free pass for banks to charge billions of dollars in new junk fees. And in a Trump administration, where there will be no one to hold these big banks accountable, as Project 2025 promises to eliminate the only watchdog that focuses solely on our nation’s consumers in the financial marketplace, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Working families have said that the cost of living is too expensive, and affordable housing is out of reach, but we know that critical housing programs will be cut and housing costs will skyrocket. Small businesses that barely survived the pandemic will be crushed by Trump’s new taxes, while major corporations will pass the increased costs of goods onto the American people. And after the military is deployed to deport millions, prices will climb even higher without workers in agriculture, construction, and other industries that rely on immigrant labor. Implementation of Trump’s policies will bring back inflation at the same time he is trying to abolish the one government agency charged with protecting against inflation: the Federal Reserve. This is not what the American people voted for.

But I guess Trump and his co-president, Elon Musk, are all poised to do all of the things basically Trump has promised. I yield back.

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