In Its Battle With Big Tech, the CFPB is Building an Army of Engineers

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of Rohit Chopra's first moves as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was launching a major investigation into Big Tech payment platforms. Soon after, it put out a call to tech whistleblowers, asking them to report misconduct at fintech companies. Now, the CFPB says it's hiring 25 technologists over the next year to help its staff of mainly economists and lawyers actually probe these new leads. The move is as sure a sign as any that the bureau's ongoing efforts to investigate and hold tech companies accountable for financial wrongdoing are only accelerating. Leading the recruiting push is Erie Meyer, a longtime Chopra aide and the first chief technologist of the CFPB. Meyer previously co-founded the United States Digital Service, the technical team that launched under President Obama after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. Like USDS, the new tech team at CFPB will recruit technologists from both the private sector and other parts of government for two-year tours of duty. But unlike USDS and its offshoots at the Department of Defense and other agencies, the goal of this team isn't to fix broken government tech, Meyer told Protocol. Instead, it's to help the government cut through tech companies' smoke screens.

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