U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Kevin Mohatt | Kevin Lamarque | | Reuters

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday accused the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of undermining President Donald Trump’s stated push to make credit cards more affordable, according to a letter obtained exclusively by CNBC.

In a letter to acting CFPB Director Russell Vought, Warren, D-Mass., noted that in the last year the agency has dropped a rule limiting credit card late fees, sided with lenders in lawsuits over deceptive practices and paused enforcement actions against the industry.

Earlier this month, Trump demanded in a social media post that U.S. banks voluntarily cap credit card interest rates at 10% for a year. When they didn’t, Trump this week called on lawmakers to pass legislation on the issue.

“I spoke with President Trump last week and told him that Congress could pass legislation to cap credit card rates, if he would fight for it,” Warren wrote in her letter to Vought.

“While Congress considers legislation to address the issue, your own actions are directly undermining the President’s stated goals,” she wrote. “Under your leadership, the CPFB has taken steps to make it easier—not harder—for big banks and credit card companies to rip off Americans.”

The letter from Warren seizes on Trump’s pivot to affordability and seeks to leverage his initiative against his own administration, escalating tensions over the financial regulatory agency that she helped to create under the Obama administration. Members of the Trump administration have sought to shutter the CFPB as part of a broader pro-business deregulatory agenda.

Current and former CFPB employees have said the agency is on life support under Vought, who has fought in court to enact mass layoffs and stop the agency’s funding.

An agency spokesperson said that the CFPB was disallowed from limiting credit card rates by the Dodd Frank Act.

Vought should be “using the full scope of [the CFPB’s] authorities to address excessive credit card costs and to crack down on bad actors,” instead of trying to dismantle the agency, Warren wrote.

She directed Vought to “immediately reinstate its rule capping credit card late fees at $8, which would save Americans more than $10 billion annually,” Warren said.

She contended Vought should also tamp down on deceptive practices around the industry’s deferred interest promotions, resume enforcement of rules around monitoring interest rate increases, respond to a mounting pile of consumer complaints, and halt bait-and-switch tactics with rewards programs.

“Either President Trump is not serious about making credit cards more affordable or you are insubordinately disregarding his direction,” she wrote.

The post Warren blasts CFPB director Vought for undermining Trump credit card affordability appeared first on Our Story Insight.

A crane towers above the mobile launcher 2 adjacent the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, July 22, 2025.

Richard Tribou | Tribune News Service | Getty Images

The director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Joseph Pelfrey, announced his resignation from the role on Thursday, CNBC confirmed.

Pelfrey said in an email to employees at the space agency that as NASA focuses on its mission to return humans to the moon, it will be “important for agency leadership to move forward with a team they choose to execute the tasks at hand.”

The email also said Pelfrey would work with NASA leaders to “pursue new ways” to “serve our space program and our great nation.” Pelfrey wasn’t immediately available to comment.

NASA confirmed Pelfrey’s resignation and said in an email to CNBC that the agency is proceeding “with a public, open competition to find the next permanent director at one of the agency’s most important centers for human spaceflight.”

At Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, Pelfrey oversaw “7,000 onsite and near-site civil service and contractor employees,” and “an annual budget of approximately $5 billion,” according to a NASA web page describing his responsibilities. The space center now employs over 6,000 people, according to the center’s official government website.

Pelfrey had planned an all-hands conference with Marshall employees this week that was canceled, said agency staffers, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters. They said Pelfrey’s resignation came as a surprise.

The White House’s 2026 budget request, which has not yet been enacted into law, includes funding for the space agency. However, NASA’s resources have declined amid Trump administration budget cuts.

About 4,000 NASA employees left through a deferred resignation program offered by the agency, and others were let go through cuts initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort that was led by Elon Musk during his days with the Trump administration.

The administration also defunded and compelled the closure of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which was housed in a building owned by Columbia University in New York.

WATCH: Why the U.S. and SpaceX need each other

The post NASA Marshall Space Flight Center director Joseph Pelfrey resigns appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Susan Monarez, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), arrives to testify for her confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on June 25, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kayla Bartkowski | Getty Images

The White House on Wednesday said President Donald Trump has fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez after she refused to resign, and will name a new replacement soon.

“The president fired her, which he has every right to do,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing.

She said Trump has “the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission,” and that he or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will announce a new director “very soon.

It comes hours after Monarez’s lawyers said she remains in the role because she is a presidential appointee and only Trump can fire her. Her lawyers did not immediately respond to a request to confirm that the president has fired Monarez, who was sworn in a few weeks ago.

It’s the latest in a leadership upheaval at the CDC.

In an earlier statement, Monarez’s attorney Mark Zaid said White House personnel had fired her, not the president. He also said she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts” and that “she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda.”

“For that, she has been targeted,” he said.

Monarez and Kennedy were at odds over vaccine policy, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing an anonymous administration official.

Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, has taken several steps to change immunization policy in the U.S.

Monarez, a longtime federal government scientist, was sworn in on July 31. She is the first CDC director to be confirmed by the Senate following a new law passed during the pandemic that required lawmakers to approve nominees for the role.

At least four other top health officials announced Wednesday they were quitting the agency shortly after the Health and Human Services Department said Monarez was “no longer” CDC director in a post on X.

In an interview on Fox News on Thursday, Kennedy declined to comment on “personnel issues.” But he said the agency “is in trouble, and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

He said Trump has “very, very ambitious hopes for the CDC right now.” But Kennedy said the CDC “has problems,” claiming that the agency took the “wrong” approach when it came to social distancing, masking and school closures during the Covid pandemic.

“If there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded … malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions for this agency, the gold standard science and who it was when we were growing up,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to be the most respected health agency in the world.”

The leadership departures comes at a tumultuous time for the agency, which is reeling from a gunman’s attack on its Atlanta headquarters on Aug. 8. A police officer died in the shooting. 

— CNBC’s Angelica Peebles contributed to this report.

The post White House says Trump has fired CDC Director Susan Monarez appeared first on Our Story Insight.