The DOGE-Suppressed Office of Consumer Financial Protection in a Time-Varying Environment: An Interaction Between the CFPB and the National Treasury Employees Union
The senior policy reporter covers Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley for The Verge. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is sending out mass layoff notices that appear to be in defiance of a court order blocking further layoffs following DOGE-induced cuts.
A source tells Fox Business that around 1,500 workers will receive RIF notices. The Wall Street Journal reported that on Thursday evening, the chief legal officer of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection sent a notice saying the agency would shift resources away from enforcement and supervision that can be done by the States.
The NTEU alleged that this violated a March court order preventing the Trump administration from carrying out a previous, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-spurred attempt to dismantle the agency. The NTEU does not believe that Judge Berman Jackson’s ruling precluded the firing of employees based on a specific assessment of their roles. Berman Jackson concurred that she had “concerns about whether agency is in compliance” with that order, and she’s instructed the administration to hand over documents about its actions to the union as the case progresses.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee who helped establish the agency, called the agency’s “dismantling” of the agency “yet another assault on consumers and our democracy by this lawless Administration, and we will fight back with everything we’ve got.”
The administration has sought to eliminate high-level officials who are responsible for keeping the privacy and security of sensitive information. The lawyer for the National Treasury Employees Union said that they were told that the jobs of all the privacy, security and cybersecurity units in the agency were going to be eliminated.