The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may not proceed with agencywide job cuts, while a D.C. federal court weighs whether the terminations would violate a preliminary injunction blocking the agency from shutting down.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia suspended the reduction in force and prohibited the agency from discontinuing any employee’s access to work systems, including email and internal platforms, until the court rules on plaintiffs’ bid to enforce the injunction.
The CFPB’s sudden move Thursday to terminate much of its workforce brought the agency’s leadership back to court, where Jackson said at a hearing Friday she is willing to resolve the motion’s merits quickly. The written order came several hours after the hearing.
The RIF notices sent to CFPB staff Thursday represent the Trump administration’s latest attempt to dismantle the agency, a longtime target of Republicans.
“Once again, the court is confronted with evidence that gives rise to concerns that there willl be no agency standing by the time it gets to consider the merits, by the time the Court of Appeals rules on the legality of the preliminary injunction, or even by the time it holds a hearing on a motion to enforce the order,” Jackson’s order said.
Jackson said at the hearing she wouldn’t allow the CFPB to “disperse 1,400 people into the universe and have them be unable to communicate with the agency” without more analysis.
A panel of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last week narrowed Jackson’s preliminary injunction blocking all firings, saying it was an overly broad measure to address the administration’s RIF plan.
The narrowed order permits the agency to terminate some employees during the trial-court proceedings, but only after “individualized” or “particularized” assessments to determine whether employees are necessary to perform the agency’s statutory duties, the appeals court said in the April 11 stay order.
During the Friday hearing, Jackson said that given the scope and speed of the layoffs, she was concerned about whether the agency complied with the narrowed preliminary injunction.
Emergency Motions
The National Treasury Employees Union and co-plaintiff groups who brought the suit against the Trump administration and acting CFPB head Russell Vought have argued that an order halting cuts was needed to prevent the agency from shutting down entirely, while CFPB leaders have framed the RIF as an effort to restructure and better align the agency’s priorities.
NTEU filed a motion late Thursday, demanding that the court order CFPB leadership to show how it hasn’t violated the terms of the injunction when it issued the RIF notices to as many as 1,483 of the agency’s more than 1,700 total staffers.
“Today’s bench order from Judge Jackson is a vindication for NTEU and its members, who wholeheartedly contend that the administration’s abrupt and chaotic RIF process does not serve the American people and is a deep violation of the rights of CFPB employees,” said NTEU President Doreen Greenwald in an emailed statement.
All affected employees were expected to be cut off from computer access by 6 p.m. Friday, which would amount to a functional work stoppage for the majority of CFPB workers, according to the plaintiffs’ motion.
“It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not “interfere with the performance” of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement,” NTEU said in its motion.
During the hearing, the NTEU submitted additional briefing in support of enforcing the preliminary injunction.
“This is going to be another example of the government embarrassing themselves by rushing to judgment too quickly and not being a lot more careful,” said Alan Kaplinsky, senior counsel at Ballard Spahr LLP, who represents clients in CFPB matters. “But the courts are ultimately going to say that as long as they comply with the statutory requirements, it doesn’t mandate that they go above and beyond what they’re required to do.”
Inside the RIF
Department of Government Efficiency staffer Gavin Kliger, one of Elon Musk’s picks to manage the CFPB layoffs, kept the RIF team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out on Thursday, an ex-member of the agency’s RIF team said in an anonymous declaration Friday.
“Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent,” the CFPB employee said.
Other members of the team allegedly voiced the concern with Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez that mass layoffs violated the court ordered requirement for a particularized assessment, but they were told to ignore it and focus on enacting a “numbers-based RIF” on instructions from Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta that agency leadership would assume the risk, according to the declaration.
Paoletta detailed the particularized assessment he conducted with two other CFPB attorneys to determine which employees are unnecessary for the agency to perform its statutory duties, which concluded that a 200-person agency could carry out those functions.
The agency also filed under seal a list of employees involved in the RIF with their job titles, according to Paoletta’s declaration.
“While the Chief Legal Counsel has intoned the phrase ‘particularized assessment,’ there is reason to believe that the defendants simply spent the days immediately following the circuit’s relaxation of the order dressing their RIF in new clothes, and that they are thumbing their nose at both this court and the court of appeals,” Jackson said in the order.
An additional hearing will be held April 28.
“It may very well in up in the Supreme Court,” Kaplinsky said. “There’s no question in my mind that they’re going to be able to cut the staffing that they have, probably not as much as they wanted, but they’re probably going to be able to significantly cut it.”
A federal judge on April 16 allowed a separate case to move forward with claims that DOGE exceeded its legal authority by attempting to access computer systems at the CFPB and other agencies.
The case is Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, order 4/18/25.
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