Deputy Director Mark Paoletta’s Remarks to the Financial Literacy and Education Commission

Good afternoon. I want to thank Secretary Bessent and the staff of the Treasury Department for convening this meeting, and for their leadership on digital financial literacy.

Under the superb leadership of Acting Director Vought, the CFPB is advancing the Trump Administration’s expansive efforts to improve financial literacy and increase early access to financial empowerment opportunities.  These efforts will help American families and strengthen the overall economy.

Unlike the Biden administration’s former CFPB Director, Rohit Chopra, this administration does not view financial education as “harmful.”  Although difficult to believe, that’s how Chopra described financial education before this very body in 2022.  Chopra lectured this Commission, devoted to Financial Education, that such education can make “individuals worse off.”

Chopra even claimed that financial education gives consumers “a deep sense of shame, reducing engagement, and creating reluctance to find a path to a more stable financial situation.”

While Chopra claimed that there is some worthwhile financial education out there, it was only going to be provided on Chopra’s own terms, and limited ones at that, as our citizens are not to be trusted to get financially literate on their own.  Rather, they must listen only to us.

Chopra’s whole focus was on scaring consumers to only listen to what Big Government said is trustworthy, and his approach to financial literacy was yet another manifestation of the Biden administration’s view of our countrymen – just as with Covid, one should not have been doing any independent research or thinking.

We have seen this playbook before, much like the disreputable Anthony Fauci telling Americans that they are too ill-informed and dumb to do their own research and make their own informed choices during COVID.