- Key insight: Alexis Goldstein is competing for a seat representing Maryland's 6th District, an area filled with federal workers that's been heavily impacted by the Trump administration's cuts to the federal workforce.
- What's at stake: Goldstein is a financial policy expert, and was fired from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week due to a year-old confrontation with the officials from the Department of Government Efficiency.
- Forward look: Goldstein enters a crowded primary field, but could ride a wave of anger directed toward the Trump administration and be a progressive voice on financial policy issues in Congress as Democrats are favored to take back the lower chamber.
WASHINGTON — Alexis Goldstein, a former program manager at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is running for Congress after she was fired from the consumer protection agency.
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Goldstein is running for Congress in Maryland's 6th District, an area that includes the western part of Washington D.C.'s Maryland suburbs, and extends out toward the more rural parts of the state that border Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The district has been reliably Democratic since 2013, and includes a disproportionately high number of federal workers who are employed either in D.C. or at the various federal agencies dotted across the Maryland suburbs, including the National Institutes of Health, which has seen drastic cuts under the Trump administration.
She enters an already crowded field.
The district is currently represented by Rep. April McClain-Delaney, a Democrat whose husband,
David Trone, the previous representative of Maryland's 6th and is also running again for the seat in 2026 after he lost his 2024 Senate bid to Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md. Trone is founder and co-owner of Total Wine & More, an alcohol retailer.
According to emails
In her Democracy Now interview, Goldstein said that she encountered DOGE officials in the CFPB headquarters as she rolled her empty stroller around the bureau's basement. She had just dropped her toddler off at daycare.
"I noticed a number of people who I had never seen before who were not wearing the required CFPB badges, and they were accessing what appeared to be CFPB equipment, so I wanted to take a closer look," she said. "We are told over and over again that we are supposed to report suspicious activities, that we are supposed to defend the sensitive data that we hold of American people."
The CFPB holds data for millions of Americans who report sensitive information to the agency, including personally identifying information and details about mortgage troubles and financial scams.
"They moved from one conference room to the other when they saw me, into a conference room that didn't have a window, and so I decided to go into that conference room," Goldstein said. "I opened the door and introduced myself, and I said, 'Hi, are you my new co-worker? What's your name? Can I show you around?' They refused to give me their name, they said that they were authorized to be there, but they didn't have to tell me their name."
Eventually, Goldstein said that she left the room, and that she was placed on administrative leave later that day. She was on administrative leave until she was fired by the bureau last week, just a few weeks before her posting was set to expire.
"I said, 'We have a lot of really sensitive information and data from Americans. We have personally identifying information. Do you know the trainings that we have to take in order to handle this? Have you had those trainings? Do you know what those trainings are?'" she said. "And they just stared at me blankly and said that they wished that security would come and kick me out of the building."
Before joining the bureau, Goldstein was the financial policy director for Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly group. Before that, she worked in finance.
"I got my start on Wall Street before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis," Goldstein said. "Part of the reason the CFPB was created by Congress is because Congress thought the other regulators fell down on the job and there needed to be a single agency to protect people from predatory scams and discrimination in lending."
Goldstein, a financial policy expert, said that she is troubled by the lack of oversight being conducted on the largest banks in the wake of the Trump administration's workforce downsizing effort.
"In normal times, we have supervisors who go and sit inside the nation's biggest banks," she said. "One of the first things the Trump administration did was send all the supervisors home and told them to stop showing up to work. And so essentially, no one is watching the biggest banks."
