Rep. Maxine Waters speaks at the 2025 Just Economy Conference on the importance of the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Transcript:
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Waters
But you’re here, and so we’ve got to get on with it. But you gotta know, the fight is on. I hope you’re ready.
So let me thank Phyllis Edwards, the executive director of Bridging Communities for the very warm welcome and introduction. Now, the work I and my Democratic colleagues do in Congress would not be possible without the support and partnership of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and all of the members. Whether you represent a community development corporation or a civil rights group, housing counseling agency, community organizing group or small businesses development group, you serve and you play rather an invaluable role, and the progress we’ve made together has changed lives. But as I come before you this morning, we are in the fight of our lives against an administration that is working to undo all of the progress we’ve made and set back the clock on some of our most fundamental rights.
As we face this five-alarm crisis head-on, our work is more important than ever, and I want to begin by talking about the nation’s small businesses. I don’t have to tell you all how critical their role is in building a truly just community. Unfortunately, one of Trump’s executive orders issued in the dead of night would gut the Community Development Financial Institution. And this fund, the CDFI Fund and the Minority Business Development Agency or MBDA, make no mistake, this will have a devastating impact on hard-working families. So I want to start with CDFIs. And I understand NCRC has more than 200 CDFIs as members. For 30 years, CDFIs have served as lifelines for underserved communities. They’ve provided financial products and services for communities in rural, native, suburban and urban areas that have been historically and systematically shut out from access to traditional banking services. We all remember during the pandemic when the big banks refused to deliver badly needed relief to small businesses and in need instead of instead prioritizing their wealthy concierge clients, it was CDFIs who stepped in to make sure small businesses could keep the lights on. Now, at that time, I was the chair of the committee, and we worked very hard with the small business committee chairwoman Nydia Velasquez, and we worked until we were able to secure another $60 billion and set aside for community financial institutions, including CDFIs, to deliver Payment Protection Program that’s the PPP. All of those loans to both diverse and truly small businesses. These CDFI loans help countless businesses keep the doors open, and I then worked with my Republican and Democratic colleagues, including Senator Mark Warner, to secure $12 billion in capital and grants for CDFIs and minority depository institutions to allow them to expand and provide financial services to small businesses and businesses owned by people of color. Many of you know that supporting CDFIs has been a long been a bipartisan effort, and while some Republicans are speaking up, I am pressing more and more of them to join us in demanding that Trump reverse the course.
Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, there is a lot of fear in this Congress. The Republicans, some of them who could work closer with us, I think join the lot of those who don’t want to do anything to upset Trump, and I’ll talk about that perhaps if I have time before I go. Trump is also trying to undermine the MBDA, an agency created by President Nixon to support minority business owners, because even Nixon couldn’t turn a blind eye to the injustice facing communities of color. The MBDA has been instrumental in helping minority-owned businesses access capital, create jobs and navigate economic challenges. Taken together, these reckless executive orders don’t just threaten entrepreneurs, they jeopardize the broader community. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, and when they suffer, jobs are lost, communities are weakened, and economic growth slows up for everyone.
Next, I want to talk about the attacks we’re seeing at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and most recently on the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. It is deeply concerning that even as our nation faces a growing housing and homelessness crisis, Trump is dismantling the very agencies tasked with, basically taking care of these issues. Trump and Musk’s DOGE have withheld housing funds provided by Congress, canceled millions of dollars in contracts that target housing discrimination and help local governments build more housing. They have already terminated 780 staff with plans to fire at least half of all staff and close two-thirds of local field offices. They’re interrupting the Fair Housing Act to remove sexual orientation and gender identity protections and have repealed Fair Housing Act regulations. This means they are making it easier for housing discrimination to go unchecked and to make matters worse, DOGE has been given access to personally identifiable data, including discrimination data from sexual assault survivors. So it is clear that Trump’s goal is cruelty, and the strategy is to defund, dismantle and destroy.
Meanwhile, instead of bringing down housing costs, like he promised, Trump is starting trade wars by imposing tariffs on our allies and has proposed releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from conservatorship without any reforms. These policies will make housing more expensive for everyone. I also know many of you are concerned about the Federal Housing Finance agency’s recent decision to roll back their Special Purpose Credit Program, which has helped 1,000s of first-time home buyers, particularly in communities of color, to access lower down payments. This decision will make it even harder for these communities to access the American dream of home ownership. Please know that I am working hard to get to the bottom of this and to push back on efforts to put America’s housing on the chopping block.
On the issue of bank mergers, I’m concerned Trump’s regulators are gearing up to resume rubber stamping these merger applications as they do. People access America will pay the price through higher junk fees and predatory actions. We’ve already seen this happen; after Wells Fargo became bigger after mergers in the 1990s it became absolutely too big to manage and repeatedly broke the law, setting up fake accounts and harming millions of consumers. Following the news of Capital One’s proposed merger with Discover, I was only I was the only member of Congress to testify at the public hearing and urge the regulators to block. If mergers like these continue, we will be left only with a handful of mega banks that will be empowered to police everyone.
So a bit about the CFPB now, I want to talk about the attacks we’re seeing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since taking office, Trump and Elon Musk have wasted no time working to basically, and I quote, delete the agency, as Musk promised in a tweet last year. Musk and his DOGE of minions have been hard at work, halting all agency operations and preventing staff from doing their jobs. They have initiated mass layoffs and zeroed out funding for the agency. They have dropped lawsuit after lawsuit that could have helped millions of ripped off consumers record billions of dollars that instead will stay in the pockets of the mega banks. Elon Musk has gained access to a treasurecove of sensitive data on consumers and financial institutions, including the payments apps that Musk’s X platform may soon compete with. These reckless and downright corrupt actions weaken safeguards Congress put in place after the subprime markets meltdown in 2008 when consumers had no watchdog to look out for them, and millions of families lost their homes.
Well. As a top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, I have news for both Trump and Musk, not, Not on my watch. Since day one, I’ve spent letter after letter. I’ve sent letter after letter to investigate different aspects of this alleged shutdown. I’ve called on the chair of the committee to immediately convene a hearing with the acting director of the agency. I’ve sounded the alarm during hearings, and just last month, I led more than 200 House Democrats in filing an amicus brief in district court in support of a lawsuit to stop this illegal shutdown. And ladies and gentlemen, there are more. There’s more to come, and I’ve taken to the streets. I stood with consumers and CFPB employees outside the CFPB offices to call Trump and Musk out directly. When I was blocked from hand delivering a letter to the HUD secretary, instead, I instead described a letter to the public at a rally with housing advocates tenants and 100 employees. And even in my district, I was so excited to see and privileged to join 1,000s of people come out to protest against Musk. We have a lot to do to take our government back from Elon Musk and create a just economy for everyone, not just the wealthy and the well-connected. My call is to action for everyone in this room to keep up the fight. We will not win if we stay at home and sit back and stay quiet. We must continue to organize, strategize and protest, because together, we are unstoppable. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to leave here understanding this is more than serious. In my estimation, this is a coup d’etat. This is a coup d’etat. And when you watch what Trump is doing, it should frighten everybody. Not only is he daring the law firms to do anything against him, not only is he saying that he is going to impeach judges who make decisions that he does not like. He is not only doing that, he has control of the Justice Department.
This is very serious. This is not like when we have a fight and we kind of understand how we can win and what we must do. This is much more difficult. We’re up against a president who is aligned with Putin in Russia, a president who I believe, with all seriousness, wants to be a dictator. This is a president that you cannot think that perhaps he’s just opposed to us philosophically. He doesn’t care about the Constitution. He does not care about democracy. He is out not only to change this democracy, but to undermine it in ways that we never dreamed of. And so we’ve got to go to the streets. We’ve got to organize, even if you don’t get an invitation to something when you hear about it, go, show up, join, make your voices heard. This is again a street fight. Now one of the things we must do, we must tell them and show them we are not afraid of them, that we are going to fight, that the people of this country deserve a government who really believes in a decent quality of life for everybody. And those of you who are working in all of the areas to help strengthen a quality of life for people, to help get the homeless off the street, to help businesses have start-up capital, to understand what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is all about, and a place where they can complain, someone will investigate and listen to them.
This work is not for naught. This work is for this country. This work is for the people. This work is what the democracy promises all of us. And so the hell with Trump and the hell with Musk. We got to fight. Fight, fight. Thank you.
