President Donald Trump goes ahead with his promise to reduce a better federal consumer guard dog.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began to send dismissal notices to almost 90% of its employees Thursday evening, reducing the agency led by senator Elizabeth Warren in 2011 in order to prevent another financial crisis like that which sparked the great recession.
Over the past decade, the CFPB has brought prosecution against large companies, including student lenders and banks like Capital One, on accusations of predatory behavior. He also made billions of dollars to consumers and presented new rules to suppress medical debt and overdraft costs.
“I regret informing you that you are assigned by a reduction in the action in force (RIF),” said a copy of the opinion consulted by Business Insider of Russell Vought, interim director of the CPFB and director of the management and budget office. “This RIF action is necessary to restructure the operations of the office to better reflect the priorities and the mission of the agency.
The opinion added that the employees “will keep access to work systems” until 6 pm on Friday, and that after this deadline, “access to the system will be interrupted, and you will be placed in an administrative leave status thanks to your official date of separation as indicated above.”
The National Union of National Treasury Employees wrote Thursday that Vought sent force reduction notices to “the vast majority of CFPB employees”. Notices, as reported for the first time by Fox Business, went to around 1,500 employees, reducing the agency’s workforce by almost 90%. The CFPB sent these figures to Bi.
“As could be expected with a rif of this size, the complainants were informed that whole offices, including those obliged by law, will have or will soon be eliminated or reduced to one person,” wrote the NTEU in the legal file.
These dismissal opinions occur only a week after a federal judge ruled on April 11 that the CFPB could move forward with the dismissal of employees deemed unnecessary to exercise the “statutory functions” of the CFPB. He followed a previous decision of a federal judge who frozen the previous attempts of the CFPB of termination, calling them “precipitated effort to dismantle and deactivate the agency completely”.
Business Insider reported on Wednesday that the CFPB had exercised new priorities for the agency in an internal note sent to employees. The memo, seen by Bi, said that the CFPB “would move the resources of the application and the supervision which can be carried out by the States”.
This included plans to “deprive” the surveillance of student speakers, medical debt, consumer data and digital payments.
These changes are part of Trump and Doge Office efforts to reduce government workforce to reduce expenses. Elon Musk, Doge’s unofficial chef, previously said that he wanted to “delete” the CFPB entirely, writing “CFPB RIP” in a February article on X.
Warren wrote in a statement Thursday evening that “Trump simply emptied almost all the CFPB staff, so the agency cannot do its job to help the Americans who are scammed by large banks and giant companies”.
“The dismantling of the CFPB in the face of an ordinance of the court blocking an illegal closure is another assault against consumers and our democracy by this law without law, and we are going to retaliate with everything we have,” she said.
The OMB and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for BI comments.
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