President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will leave the $18 trillion consumer lending market without guardrails and could result in the same sort of financial catastrophe that saw the agency created, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said.

Without the CFPB, the senator warned Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell during a Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing held on Tuesday, there is effectively “no cop on the beat” watching the big banks.

“The CFPB is our law enforcement agency to make sure that the giant banks follow the rules on consumer protection. And for me, right now, I’d be really worried about doing business with a giant bank when there is no cop on the beat,” she told Powell.

Powell, for his part, said “bank accounts overall across the economy are safe” and backed by government deposit insurance.

The CFPB came about in response to the financial crisis of 2008, when the nation’s real estate bubble burst. The Bureau was created to protect consumers from the sort of shady banking practices that led to the market collapse, and to fill a void barely covered by a patchwork of state laws and federal regulations, Warren said.

According to Warren’s senatorial campaign — which is fundraising off of Trump’s attempts to dismantle her brainchild — since its creation by Congress the CFPB has returned “over $21 billion directly to consumers who got cheated by financial institutions.”

Trump fired CFPB Director Rohit Chopra on Feb. 1, and placed the agency under the control of Russel Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the architects of “Project 2025.” Over the weekend, Vought instructed CFPB employees to halt their work and to “cease all supervision and examination activity.”

The CFPB’s offices were then ordered closed through this week, and employees instructed to not to report there.

Norbert Michel, vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, told the Herald that the Trump Administration’s move to close the agency make sense, since, he said, it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

“It is an unnecessary agency. You don’t need, for example, the FTC and the CFPB. The DOJ and state governments also have a role in consumer protection.” he said.

“If the goal is to protect consumers from fraud, we do not need the CFPB to accomplish that goal. Likewise, we do not need the CFPB to enforce rules and regulations for the mortgage market. We have too many redundant federal agencies, and the CFPB is a prime example,” he said.

In creating the agency, Michel said, Congress sent several existing consumer protection functions out of other agencies and placed them under CFPB. It isn’t as if the government invented consumer protection in 2008, he said.

“People should recognize that if Congress had never created the CFPB, there still would have been consumer protection in financial markets just as in other markets. To create the CFPB, Congress moved several consumer protection statutes to the new agency, and created an undefined legal standard that the agency could use in some cases. People should be under no illusion about what this agency is and what would happen if it were gone,” he said.

But Chopra said without the agency he led until recently watching the banks, the chances of another scenario like the 2008 financial collapse increase substantially.

“We had this experiment before in the years leading up to the subprime mortgage crisis. And as we all know, it was an absolute catastrophe. We had a whole set of mortgage lenders and other companies that had basically no oversight, and we saw trillions of dollars of wealth in our country disappear,” he told MSNBC.

“It just feels like shutting down the CFPB is begging for another financial crisis,” he said.

Special Government Employee Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency,” said in social media postings last week that the agency does “above zero good things,” but still needs to go.

“CFRB RIP,” he wrote.