Q&A
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June 17, 2026
The Maryland congressional Candidate is running to ban data centers, abolish ICE, and get back what the rich have stolen.
Maryland congressional candidate Alexis Goldstein. (Alexis Goldstein for Maryland)
Back in 2011, when Maryland congressional candidate Alexis Goldstein first joined Occupy Wall Street, she was still shaking off the dog-eat-dog world of the Wall Street job she had just quit. In Occupy’s famously long and non-hierarchical meetings, she was relieved to find a space where people were valued not for making money but for the unique role they could play in feeding, caring for, educating, or organizing others. Goldstein soon became one of the movement’s leading financial experts—someone who could advocate for financial regulation, then use her Wall Street credibility to explain how they could work.
After Occupy, she continued to pursue the same goal of bringing the financial sector to heel as an employee of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency designed to protect ordinary people from the predations of the finance sector, from payday loans to foreclosures. Goldstein is therefore an unusual figure: a movement wonk.
In 2025, Elon Musk’s notorious cohort of 20-somethings at DOGE invaded the CFPB. (“We put out a very surly press release about how we look forward to the smell of Axe body spray in our hallways,”Goldstein told me.) That February, Goldstein arrived at work from dropping off her child at daycare and noticed strangers without badges in the halls. She began filming them with her phone in her stroller’s cupholder. When she asked them who they were, and if they were trained to handle the agency’s sensitive data, they refused to answer her questions.
This was a red flag for Goldstein. By nature, the agency must deal with extremely sensitive information—everything from foreclosures to overdraft fees to car repossessions involve some degree of intimate disclosure, often made during one of the most vulnerable moments of a person’s life. She had also learned, while working on a project investigating payment platforms like Google Pay, Apple Pay, MetaPay, how valuable this information was to Big Tech companies. “All the very fancy lawyers for Google would tell us time and time again, ‘You’re asking us for this incredibly sensitive proprietary data that would be incredibly damaging to us if it ever got out,’” she said. Before Musk had started hoovering up agency data, he had talked about launching a payment platform, X Money. “I was like, ‘Oh, what a great way to undercut all of your competitors by going directly to the regulator that has all their sensitive data,” Goldstein said.
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The DOGE members called security on Goldstein. Then, in January of this year, she was fired from the CFPB for “taking a vigilante approach,” according to reporting in Bloomberg News , that “put the Bureau off on the wrong foot with the new administration.” Now she’s running for Congress in her home state of Maryland against the incumbent, whose husband held the job before her, and the billionaire David Trone, among others.
When I call Goldstein on Zoom, she’s holding her five-month-old daughter and wearing a T-shirt featuring a skull emblazoned with the number 335—the local of her former union, the National Treasury Employees Union. “We don’t have to convince anyone that the billionaires are stealing from us,” she told me. “Everybody already knows. The public is so far ahead. On issues like data centers or even like abolishing ICE, Congress has yet to catch up.”
I spoke with Goldstein about her district and taking on America’s billionaires, data centers, immigration authorities, and the Israel lobby. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
— Sarah Leonard
Sarah Leonard: Tell me about Maryland’s sixth district.
Alexis Goldstein: It’s a very gerrymandered district—it looks like the handle of Maryland. A lot of people work at educational institutions or research institutions. Then there’s three counties that are more rural: Washington County, Garrett County, Allegheny County. They’re much less populated, incomes are much lower, and the main employer tends to be the local government or a school, K-12 or higher education. In Garrett County, there’s no public transportation, there’s no public housing authority. But in Montgomery County and Frederick County, there are free buses—sort of like what Mamdani wants to do in New York. So there are some really cool things happening in the district, but it’s not well spread out.
SL: How can your specific background make you of service to this district?
AG: There’s a huge slumlord problem in western Maryland. People there have said, “You seem to know a lot of consumer lawyers—win or lose, will you come back and help connect us so we can fight these slumlords?” I am used to seeing like a policy person, so I’m like, “Oh, well that’s illegal [behavior]. We could just sue them.” Often people don’t even know…
Read the full article at The Nation →
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