Section 1033: DC’s Quiet Takeover of Your Financial Data

Originally published at The Daily Economy. 

​Washington never misses a chance to promise “fairness” while tightening its grip on the financial system. For more than a decade, regulators and central bankers have stretched their authority far beyond the original intent of the law, distorting markets, punishing savers, and concentrating economic power in the hands of bureaucrats. 

The latest example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rule, which marks a new front in Washington’s quiet campaign to nationalize financial data under the guise of “consumer empowerment.”

Section 1033 was intended to help consumers access their financial information. In practice, the Biden-era CFPB twisted it into a sweeping mandate that forces banks, credit unions, and fintech companies to share customer data with third parties, regardless of cost, security, or consent. Regulators call this “data portability.” But it’s really data coercion, forced transfer of private information directed by the government. 

By compelling institutions to open their systems to outside actors, the CFPB is creating massive cybersecurity risks and legal uncertainty. Once that data leaves a secure bank environment, who’s responsible if it’s hacked or sold? The agency doesn’t say, because it doesn’t have to. It operates as a mostly unaccountable branch of government funded by the Federal Reserve.

This new rule fits a pattern that stretches across administrations of both parties. 

The Federal Reserve has spent years manipulating the economy through its own version of central planning. Its balance sheet exploded from about $4 trillion before the COVID lockdowns to nearly $9 trillion at the peak, and even after years of “tightening,” it still sits around $6.6 trillion, roughly 20 percent of US GDP. That extraordinary expansion, coupled with record federal deficits, monetized Washington’s overspending and triggered the inflation surge Americans are still feeling today. 

The Fed’s interventions distorted credit markets, inflated asset prices, and fueled the illusion that easy money could substitute for productivity. The result has been slower growth, declining real wages, and a public that no longer trusts the dollar — or the institutions that manage it.

At the same time, agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have extended open-ended guarantees to ever-larger deposits up to $250,000, signaling to financial institutions that risk doesn’t really matter because taxpayers will always clean up the mess. The more Washington insulates these institutions from market discipline, the more reckless behavior it encourages. That’s not consumer protection; that’s moral hazard on a national scale.

The CFPB’s Section 1033 rule compounds that problem by politicizing access to financial data. It hands Washington the ability to dictate not only how money moves but also how information about money moves. 

Once regulators can decide which companies may access data and on what terms, they effectively control the competitive landscape of American finance. This is industrial policy in digital disguise. And it’s already spilling into state politics, where legislators are introducing new caps on credit card interest rates, limits on interchange fees, and other well-intentioned but destructive interventions. Each of these measures increases costs for consumers, reduces credit access for the poor, and consolidates power among the largest incumbents who can afford the compliance burden. If this sounds like central planning, that’s because it is. 

A handful of bureaucrats now wield more influence over the financial system than the millions of Americans who depend on it. The Fed’s technocrats decide the cost of money. The CFPB dictates how data may flow. The FDIC guarantees risks that private firms should bear. And Congress keeps spending as if none of it matters, driving the national debt above $37 trillion and pushing annual interest payments past $1.1 trillion — a sum larger than the defense budget. These are not isolated mistakes. They are symptoms of a government that has grown far beyond its competence.

The path forward begins with humility and a return to first principles. The Fed should stop acting as an unelected economic czar and start shrinking its balance sheet toward historical norms, or possibly back to six percent of GDP, where it was before the Great Financial Crisis. Congress should reassert its oversight role and restore a rules-based monetary framework that ties money growth to economic fundamentals, not political convenience. The CFPB should be dismantled or at least stripped of its unilateral authority, with legitimate fraud enforcement consolidated under accountable agencies. Most importantly, Washington must end its obsession with managing markets and start trusting them again.

America’s prosperity was built on sound money, competition, and personal responsibility — not on bureaucratic control. If we want a financial system that works for everyone, we must end the centralization of both money and data. Section 1033 isn’t just another bad rule; it’s a warning sign of how far we’ve drifted from a truly free economy. The stakes are simple: either Americans control their financial future, or Washington does. It’s time to choose the former.