Trump Plans to End CFPB Despite Reviving Work, Official Says (1)

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official charged with laying off the agency’s staff said the Trump administration pushed to fully shutter the watchdog as recently as last week, even as a court probes whether it can.

The official, testifying under the pseudonym Alex Doe at a hearing Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said the CFPB’s reduction-in-force team held meetings with the Office of Personnel Management as late as March 6 to discuss the process for eliminating the agency. Doe was the leader of the CFPB RIF team.

CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta has taken steps to bring back some key CFPB functions, such as its congressionally mandated consumer response operation. But according to Doe, those efforts are merely intended to keep the agency running before it’s shut down entirely.

“No one has told me the plan has changed,” Doe said.

The second phase of the plan involved eliminating the rest of the CFPB’s employees within 90 days, according to testimony from Doe and CFPB Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez.

Agency leaders had proposed eliminating around 1,200 positions by Feb. 14, the officials testified. The CFPB reached a deal at the time with the National Treasury Employees Union and other plaintiffs to put the mass firing on hold while Judge Amy Berman Jackson weighs a preliminary injunction.

The CFPB planned to justify the mass terminations by using executive orders from the White House, guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, and a Feb. 10 stop-work email from acting CFPB Director Russell Vought, Doe said.

Those documents were used to justify the termination of probationary and term employees ahead of the planned RIF, Doe said.

Vought is also the OMB’s director.

At a meeting following a Feb. 14 hearing before Jackson, Martinez said the agreement would delay the RIF, Doe testified.

“I remember him referring to it as a problem,” Doe said.

Despite the pending litigation, the CFPB RIF team’s last meeting with OPM was intended to discuss the costs of having the White House personnel office shut down the consumer watchdog, Doe said.

“We were paying them to help us lay ourselves off,” Doe said.

Doe said there was no discussion about involving Congress in eliminating the agency.

Consumer Response

The CFPB’s consumer response unit, mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, also came up at the hearing.

Although the agency restarted many canceled contracts affecting the unit, not all of the necessary ones were reinstated, said Matthew Pfaff, the CFPB’s chief of staff for the Office of Consumer Response

In some instances, vendors had already reassigned their staff members to work on other projects, Pfaff said. Because of that, the contracts may be reactivated now but the tools still aren’t functioning, he said.

Liam Holland, a Justice Department attorney representing the CFPB, asked Pfaff whether he was aware that the Office of Consumer Response wasn’t in the initial RIF plan.

“No,” Pfaff responded.

“Are we?” Jackson said.

Robert Friedman of Gupta Wessler LLP, representing the plaintiffs, pointed to a memo stating the consumer office would be considered for a secondary reduction-in-force.

Doe’s testimony caught Jackson’s attention.

While she hadn’t made a final decision, Jackson said she was “leaning” toward providing injunctive relief to the plaintiffs.

The same people at the CFPB talking about the RIF are “still sitting” in the room, she said.

If lawmakers ultimately decide to eliminate the CFPB or keep it going, there may be nothing left of the agency without stopping plans to eliminate it, she said.

“I don’t think it’s up to the president and Mr. Vought,” Jackson said.

The plaintiffs are also represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group.

The case is NTEU v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, evidentiary hearing 3/11/25.