CFPB Raced to Fire Staff Ahead of Court Hearing, Emails Show (1)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raced to terminate large numbers of its staff ahead of a February hearing where a federal judge in Washington weighed whether to delay those firings, new emails submitted in litigation over efforts to shutter the agency show.

Agency officials exchanged a flurry of emails ahead of a 2 p.m. hearing on Feb. 14 before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia to consider a motion from plaintiffs seeking a temporary restraining order to block the firings.

The National Treasury Employees Union—which represents a significant chunk of the CFPB’s workforce—along with the NAACP, the National Consumer Law Center, and other plaintiffs seeking to block the Trump administration’s moves had filed an amended complaint one day earlier warning that up to 95% of the staff was set to be terminated.

CFPB Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez sent an email at 12:38 p.m. the day of the hearing to a recipient whose name was blacked out in court filings stating that the agency had received authorization from the Office of Personnel Management for an expedited, 30-day reduction-in-force order.

All staff subject to the RIF would be put on administrative leave and called back only to perform “closeout duties,” with notices going out at the end of the day, the email said.

Martinez received an email at 1:36 p.m. alerting him of the 2 p.m. hearing.

“While we continue preparing, it’s just a consideration when deciding when to send out the notices,” that email said.

A 1:44 email from a CFPB official whose name was blacked out said the agency would have to move faster.

“Apologies, but we have been instructed we do not have until COB,” the email said.

In the end, the CFPB planned to subject units comprising 1,175 workers to the RIF process, including large swaths of the supervision and enforcement staff, according to a Feb. 13 memo from Martinez to OPM submitted by the plaintiffs.

The agency had just over 1,750 employees at the end of September, according to its fiscal 2024 financial report.

The CFPB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Congressional Mandates

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act mandated that the CFPB conduct supervision of all banks with over $10 billion in assets as well as certain nonbank consumer finance companies, such as mortgage services and consumer credit reporting companies.

The emails submitted by the plaintiffs also show that the agency’s examiners haven’t been authorized to return to work.

“After we are done with providing the information for the report Casey requested yesterday we are to go back on Administrative Leave,” one examiner said in a March 6 email recapping a meeting with Cassandra Huggins, the CFPB’s principal deputy assistant director for supervision policy and operations.

Over the course of the litigation, the CFPB has rushed to bring back some staff to carry out legally mandated work, such as a report on the credit card market.

But an email submitted by the plaintiffs shows the CFPB may not be bringing back enough people to carry out the work.

“We should not move forward with developing new platform features or data products (as we had been) because we need to spend time figuring out how we will support our statutorily required functions with dramatically less staff/contractors/fewer systems,” a Friday email from a CFPB employee whose name was blacked out said.

Jackson is set to hold an evidentiary hearing in the case featuring testimony from Martinez on March 10.

Questions over the veracity of statements from Martinez have become a central part of the case.

Martinez conceded in the emails that he was among staff that would be included in a subsequent reduction-in-force.

Contract Cancellations

The parties on Friday separately told the court they’d agreed to extend through March 17 an agreement reached in the litigation to pause contract terminations while Jackson weighs a broader injunction.

The CFPB under acting chief Russell Vought started canceling more than $100 million in contracts last month, though internal emails posted in the case show the agency attempting to restore some contracts needed for congressionally mandated tasks.

The CFPB’s position is that the contract pause doesn’t prevent the agency from canceling the lease on its Washington headquarters, according to the agreement notice.

Gupta Wessler LLP and the Public Citizen Litigation Group represent the plaintiffs.

The case is NTEU v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, 3/7/25.