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🔥 Today’s Lever story (attached below): Tim Scott is “proud” to protect his donors’ junk fees. 🎧 On Lever Time: Behind RFK Jr.’s war with the processed food industry. ⬇️ Spend three minutes reading this 745-word newsletter to learn about:
- LEVER SCOOP: Why Trump is trying to roll back 50 years of environmental law.
- Billionaires’ secret newspaper.
- Musk’s bid to steal your IRS data.
- The clandestine industry behind Melania Trump’s new documentary.
TODAY'S NUGGETS
👀 Elon wants to see your tax return. Musk and his small army of DOGE deregulators are seeking access to Internal Revenue Service data systems tracking the financial history of every taxpaying individual, business, and organization in the country — including personal identification numbers and bank information. Guess it’s only illegal to steal IRS information when it's Donald Trump’s. 😂 Bill Burr FTW. The comedian just said the thing the Democratic Party still can’t bring itself to say because it is still run by elites and donors who are looting the working class. 💾 CFPB, we hardly knew ye. The former Chief Technologist of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is warning that twelve years of "critical” documentation at the agency is at “imminent risk” of being permanently deleted by Elon Musk. Erie Meyer, an eight-year veteran of the agency, cautions that if DOGE wipes the CFPB’s databases, there will be “immediate, irrevocable… [and] catastrophic effects” for consumers and regulators. In court last week, Trump officials pledged not to disappear the bureau’s data… for now. 🗞️ Billionaires’ secret newspaper. The oil tycoon behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is helping fund a dark-money propaganda war against opposition to his Earth-destroying agenda — including this pro-pipeline “newspaper” mailed to North Dakota voters’ homes. - Kelcy Warren, a billionaire and longtime Trump donor, previously sued Rep. Beto O’Rourke after the former Texas Democratic representative criticized Warren’s $1 million campaign donation to Gov. Gregg Abbott (R). Thankfully, we still have free speech (for now) and his suit was dismissed.
🎥 Pop culture goes agitprop. Jeff Bezos recently gave Melania Trump a $40 million Bret Rattner Amazon Prime documentary over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. At the same time, Hollywood is making it almost impossible for anyone to see a critically acclaimed star-studded film about the darker side of Trump’s rise. It all reflects how newly consolidated corporate studios have been using their market power to control the discourse.
WHAT STAGE OF CAPITALISM IS THIS?
YOU LOVE TO SEE IT
Chicago runs clean. As of 2025, all municipal buildings in Chicago, including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet, are officially running completely on renewable energy. The switch is expected to reduce the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road. 😍 Want more You Love To See It? Upgrade your membership to The Lever to receive a roundup of the week's good news every Saturday.
NEWS DIVE
 (AP Photo/Pool and Gerald Herbert) [View in browser.] Nice enviro law you’ve got there... Over the weekend, the Trump administration appeared to roll back enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires all federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their work by conducting rigorous environmental assessments and considering public comment. In a filing submitted Feb. 16, administration officials announced an interim rule titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations.” ...Be a shame if something happened to it. Pro-business interests have long complained that the environmental review process established under NEPA has hindered development and investment. Environmental activists, on the other hand, say NEPA gives citizens a critical say in which projects their tax dollars are spent on, allowing hundreds of millions of Americans to review and weigh in on federal projects ranging from roads and bridges to senior living facilities and outdoor recreation centers. They've been planning this. Project 2025 — the conservative policy agenda authored by Trump’s former aides — said that the government is “abusing” NEPA, and has called for severely limiting the law. And this isn’t even the first time Trump has come for NEPA: At the end of his first term, the president tried to roll back environmental review requirements for infrastructure projects, but these changes were later reversed by the Biden administration.
STAT OF THE DAY
23.7%
U.S. functional unemployment rate (includes unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage). (Source: Politico)
DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS
🎨 Make Artists Human Again. We loved this reimagined anti-AI 1974 MAD Magazine cover. 🧪 There may be a plastic spoon in your brain. No worries, though. 📱 An open letter… to everyone we owe a text back. Sorry.
FINAL THOUGHT
“A lot of the people who want to cut aviation safety do not fly commercial.” — Rep. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii)
🎯 Enjoying this newsletter? Corporate giants, corrupt politicians, corporate media — they’re all trying to stop us. So we can continue doing this work, we need your support. If you are able, become a paid supporter today.
TODAY’S STORY
Tim Scott Is “Proud” To Protect His Donors’ Junk Fees
By Freddy Brewster
 Sen. Tim Scott, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, speaks on Capitol Hill on Feb. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) [View in browser.] As the Trump administration dismantles key consumer protection agencies, the Senate Republican now tasked with overseeing these financial regulators has received millions from banking and financial interests, defended their right to charge “junk fees,” and just introduced a resolution allowing banks to once again charge customers unnecessarily high fees when they overdraft their accounts. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) has received more than $5.3 million in campaign donations from banking, securities, and investment interests since 2009. His largest individual donors include financial executives who have given him nearly $1 million to fund his campaign efforts, and he’s taken thousands from donors affiliated with major banks targeted by financial regulators for excessive overdraft fees, according to federal data reviewed by The Lever. As the newly elected chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Scott is responsible for setting the committee’s agenda, which oversees key federal banking and financial regulatory agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Scott has promised to support cutting CFPB funding to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, slash regulations for credit lending, and help cryptocurrencies and fintech platforms become more entrenched within the traditional banking systems. On Feb. 13, Scott and Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) introduced a resolution that would roll back a recent CFPB rule placing a $5 cap on what most banks can charge customers when they overdraft their accounts. Prior to the new rule, such overdraft fees earned banks billions of dollars each year, a practice Scott passionately defended by calling the CFPB’s overdraft reform efforts a “smear campaign” against big banks. ”The Biden administration’s CFPB routinely targeted legitimate payment incentives and practices in pursuit of political headlines over sound policies,” Scott said in a statement. “The overdraft rule was yet another example — many consumers rely on overdraft services to make ends meet and limiting this practice will push Americans to riskier financial products.” “I’m proud to lead the effort to overturn this misguided rule and protect Americans’ access to important financial services,” he added. It’s no coincidence that Scott is trying to roll back junk fee protections after receiving millions from banking and financial interests, said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy adviser at the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “It’s impossible to divorce the financial sector [campaign] contributions and the resulting policy,” Naylor told The Lever. “One joins the Banking Committee because it’s a lucrative source of campaign contributions. That’s certainly true of Republicans, it’s also true of Democrats.” According to comment letters reviewed by The Lever, Scott twice wrote to the CFPB during the Biden administration in support of allowing financial institutions to charge consumers high overdraft and credit card late fees. “The CFPB has launched a relentless smear campaign against banks that offer optional overdraft services to their customers,” Scott and other Republican senators on the Banking Committee wrote in a Sept. 12, 2022 comment letter to the CFPB. “Charging fees that customers chose to pay should not be disturbing or illegal, and yet, the CFPB appears to have developed a particular disdain for banks charging their customers for services, pejoratively calling overdraft protection ‘junk fees.’”
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Scott and other Republican senators sent 10 letters to the CFPB between April 2021 and July 2024. The letters span a variety of issues and range from “modest questions to acerbic, antagonistic, aggressive questions of the regulator,” Naylor said, adding that Scott “is not a friend to the American consumer.” Some financial experts argue that overdraft fee collection is an unnecessary banking practice designed to exploit consumers for profit. In 2021, regulators found the average penalty for consumers for overdrawing their bank accounts was around $35, and such charges earn banks billions of dollars in revenue each year. Scott has a history of defending banks that have preyed on consumers, and his tenure as the chair of the Senate Banking Committee comes amid a widespread effort by the Trump administration to dismantle consumer protections and financial regulatory bodies. Scott’s office did not respond to a request for comment. On Feb. 8, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered CFPB staff to suspend nearly all of their activities, including supervision of financial institutions. The following day, Bessent ordered all bureau employees to stay home because the CFPB headquarters would be closed for a week. And two days after that, Trump announced his choice for a permanent CFPB chief: Jonathan McKernan, a former banking regulator who has opposed increased oversight of bank mergers and protections for bank customers. The same day Scott announced his intention to roll back overdraft fee limits, more than 185 Democratic Senators and House members wrote a letter claiming the Trump administration “has effectively fired the financial cop on the beat” by trying to shutter the CFPB. Who’s Afraid Of The CFPB?The CFPB was established in 2010 in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, during which more than 6 million people lost their homes due to foreclosure and more than 30 million people lost their jobs. While other agencies like the Justice Department, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission focus mostly on white-collar crimes, the CFPB is tasked with policing large financial institutions as well as debt collectors, payday lenders, and mortgage providers, and protecting consumers from unfair financial practices. Since 2010, the bureau has returned more than $20 billion to consumers who were victims of financial scams, fraud, and other predatory practices. For example, in 2024, the CFPB ordered a group of credit repair companies to return more than $1.8 billion to 4.3 million consumers for charging illegal fees and using deceptive marketing practices. The bureau has also focused on eliminating “junk fees” that banks and other financial institutions charge consumers for overdrawing their accounts and restricting other practices, such as capping how much credit card companies can charge for late payments. In 2019, the top 20 banks in the U.S. collected more than $11 billion in overdraft and insufficient fund fees issued to consumers, according to the CFPB. In 2023, banks earned more than $5.8 billion in overdraft fees, federal data shows. Years ago, banks charged overdraft fees for customers who wrote bad checks or overdrew their accounts because the process for banks to retrieve their money came with a cost, said Naylor with Public Citizen. But that is largely no longer the case. “In the days of electronics, where the bank knows that you have insufficient funds, it can just set an algorithm to block that payment,” he said. “So the concept that it costs you to get penalized $32 on average [for overdrawing your account] is simply useless, and many banks don’t charge. There are banks though that this is how they make their profit.” Post-pandemic, overdraft fee revenue for the top banks spiked in 2022, with banks collecting $7.61 billion in fee revenues. Around that time, the CFPB began scrutinizing the practice by issuing reports highlighting how much money banks were raking in from overdraft fees and issuing enforcement actions. In January 2022, the CFPB announced a request for public comment on how overdraft and hidden banking fees were affecting consumers, in anticipation of possible regulations.
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“Many financial institutions obscure the true price of their services by luring customers with enticing offers and then charging excessive junk fees,” said former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a January 2022 press release. “By promoting competition and ridding the market of illegal practices, we hope to save Americans billions.” The CFPB’s scrutiny of overdraft fees led Scott and other Republican senators to condemn the bureau’s efforts in their Sept. 12, 2022 letter. “Rather than operating as a tough, but fair and sensible regulator, the CFPB is again pursuing a radical and highly-politicized agenda unbounded by statutory limits,” the senators wrote. CFPB regulators also began working to lower the cost of late credit card payment penalties. In 2022, major credit card companies charged their customers more than $105 billion in interest and more than $25 billion in fees, the highest amount ever measured. On April 13, 2023, Scott and other senators again wrote to the bureau to complain about its banking crackdowns. “Last year, the CFPB launched an unfair initiative targeting standard fees charged by credit providers that included reasonable payment incentive mechanisms such as overdraft and credit card late fees,” the senators wrote. “This initiative mislabeled lawful payment incentives by calling them ‘junk fees’ and falsely suggested that their only purpose is corporate greed.” The senators continued, “In truth, these fees are used for a variety of legitimate purposes, including encouraging consumers to make responsible financial decisions such as balancing their checkbooks and discouraging consumers from paying their bills late or otherwise violating the terms of financial agreements.” Despite the senators’ concerns, the CFPB finalized a rule capping late credit card payment penalties to $8 in March 2024. Then, in December 2024, the CFPB finalized its rule on overdraft fees, requiring large banks and financial institutions to in most cases charge no more than $5 in overdraft fees. Scott is now working to rescind the overdraft fee rule using the Congressional Review Act, which empowers Congress to repeal any agency rule issued within the last few months of a previous president’s administration. On Feb. 12, House Republicans voted to extend the Congressional Review Act’s scope to include the entire final year of a previous president’s term — meaning the late credit card late fee cap could also be at risk if the bill becomes law. Scott’s Piggy BankBefore being elected to the Senate in 2013, Scott, a former insurance salesperson, held various state and local positions and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2023, he mounted a short-lived campaign for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Throughout his federal career, Scott has been a major benefactor of campaign contributions from the banking and financial sectors. The largest contributor to Scott’s election efforts throughout his career has been employees and political action committees affiliated with the multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs, according to campaign finance watchdog group OpenSecrets. These individuals and groups have donated more than $278,000 to Scott since 2009. This includes nearly $26,000 from Goldman Sachs Executive Vice President John Rogers, and $10,000 each from company executives David Solomon and David Philip, according to federal data reviewed by The Lever. Scott and his campaign committees have also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from hedge fund magnates — including more than $266,000 from Paul Singer, CEO and president of Elliott Investment Management, and nearly $395,000 from Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point LLC. He’s furthermore received money from big banks targeted by regulators for gouging consumers with junk fees A political action committee made up of Wells Fargo employees has donated more than $29,000 to Scott’s election efforts since 2013. Additionally, political action committees affiliated with Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have donated $18,500 combined to Scott’s election efforts since 2013. In 2022, the CFPB published a chart highlighting how Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America together collected more than $2.7 billion in overdraft fees over a nine-month period in 2021. Now, having been elected chair of the Senate Banking Committee in January, Scott has the power to set the agenda for the committee that oversees the CFPB — which helps regulate his financial industry donors.
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Crypto And Fintech Protection Bureau?Last month, Scott said he would support cutting the CFPB’s funding as a way to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — an economic plan that will largely benefit corporations and the wealthy, according to Trump’s own Treasury Department. According to the Banking Committee’s website, Scott’s agenda will focus on cutting regulations for credit, capital, and other financial lending services including financial technology companies — a key focus of billionaire Elon Musk, who posted “CFPB RIP” on Feb. 7 and claimed that the bureau “did above zero good things, but still need to go.” X, Musk’s social media company formerly known as Twitter, partnered with Visa in January to allow X users to send money through their accounts similar to apps like Venmo or Zelle. The move would place Musk’s business under CFPB oversight. “Elon Musk is turning X into a payments platform, and the CFPB would have been a primary impediment to his doing so,” said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University. “Given the ascendance of Silicon Valley interests in this government, I think that’s an important layer to the story of why we’re losing the CFPB.” Scott also promised that one of the committee’s major goals would be to slash regulations for the crypto industry. In January, Trump’s SEC, an agency that Scott oversees, rescinded a key advisory bulletin that essentially blocked banks and large financial institutions from holding large stores of cryptocurrencies and conducting certain crypto transactions, due to crypto’s potential to cause widespread volatility in the financial markets. Scott became a staunch supporter of cryptocurrencies this past summer when he vowed to help pass a bill establishing a federally-held Bitcoin stockpile, which would likely be a massive handout to the largest Bitcoin owners. Scott received more than $38,000 in campaign donations this past election cycle from a number of crypto figureheads, despite not facing reelection, federal data shows. Experts warn that allowing largely unregulated and volatile cryptocurrencies to become enmeshed in the country’s financial system could lead to economic disaster. “We’re in a position where without consumer safeguards, there can be contagion for the rest of the financial system,” Allen said. “So if we lose the CFPB, consumers are losing someone that they can go to for help.” In the Senate Banking Committee’s policy agenda, Scott also promised to “ensure all agencies within the committee’s jurisdiction are open and transparent, follow the law, and advance commonsense policies that create economic opportunity.” But Allen is doubtful that Scott will hold Musk and other Trump officials accountable for their efforts to dismantle these agencies. So is Naylor at Public Citizen, who believes efforts to gut consumer protections will hurt the average consumer. “Bankers have long known that they are highly regulated, and they need to buy off both the Democrats as well as the Republicans,” Naylor said. “It’s unfortunate that banking policy is relatively unmonitored by people sitting around their kitchen table, and even though they might be angry at an overdraft fee and so forth, they may not link that back to their senator.”
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