More than 1,400 workers from the Consumer Financial Protection Office (CFPB) was interrupted their posts on Thursday in the midst of a broader reshuffle of the Trump administration to the independent government agency, sources told Wired. There were around 1,700 employees in total at the CFPB.
The mass reduction in force in force, or RIF, occurs almost a month after a federal judge made a temporary prohibition prescription prohibiting the Trump administration from withdrawing from probationary employees at the CFPB and other agencies. On Friday, a court of appeal judged that the CFPB could start the layoffs again as long as “individual evaluations” were carried out for each dismissed employee. About 200 employees will be left at the CFPB, which has effectively emptied the agency that Elon Musk previously said that should be “deleted”.
In an email sent to the CFPB staff on Wednesday, the CFPB legal director Mark Paoletta announced that the agency would focus on its supervision roles and to “tangible damage to consumers”. Medical debt, student loans, consumer data and digital payments have all been identified as subjects that the CFPB “will deprive”, according to the document.
“As far as I know, this literally affects all offices to some extent with at least some of them completely destroyed,” said a CFPB worker finished. “I guess that at the end, there will only be a few steering positions remaining more skeleton crew for functions very obviously legally required from the office.
The CFPB was created by the Dodd-Frank 2010 law, a vast legislation which imposed a substantial regulatory reform following the financial crisis of 2008. The agency was created to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive financial practices, and it claims to be responsible for $ 19.7 billion for consumer relief since its creation, as well as $ 5 billion in civil penalties
“They did not follow the ABC (collective agreement), do not follow Dodd-Frank and did not give a sufficient notice to anyone,” said a CFPB employee who lost his job on Thursday.
Musk and other preservatives have asked that the CFPB be destroyed for a while. The Chapter Project 2025 on financial regulation agencies describes it as “a highly politicized, damaging and completely inexplicable federal agency” and calls for abolishing it. In February, Musk wrote “RIP CFPB” with a tombstone emoji in a post X. In November, he posted: “Remove the CFPB”.
In February, Wired reported that three DOGE agents, including Gavin Kliger and Nikhil Rajpal, had access to HR, purchases and financial infrastructure of the CFPB. DOGE workers had access to all the agency systems on Friday, Bloomberg reported, including the bank’s examination and application files. Other DOGE access requests have continued throughout the month.
“Do not pay attention to what they say about the CFPB, pay attention to what they are doing,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, director of Energy Power of Demand Progress, in a statement responding to the cuts on Thursday. “And what they make is systematically avoiding all efforts to protect the military and all the Americans from fraud and scams while simultaneously leaving Wall Street, Big Banks and Big Tech.”
