mass layoffs notices are befalling workers in the CFPB
An Injunction against the Trump Administration to Dismantle a CFPB, whose Mass Terminations Do Not Imply a Reduction-in-force Action
is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She wrote about antitrust, privacy and content moderation when she covered tech policy at CNBC.
“I regret to inform you that you are affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” says a notice reviewed by The Verge that was sent by CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought to an agency employee. “This RIF action is necessary to restructure the Bureau’s operation to better reflect the agency’s priorities and mission.” Access to CFPB systems will be cut off after Friday, and employees will be placed on administrative leave until their official end date, the notice says.
In March, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration not to “terminate any CFPB employee, except for cause related to the individual employee’s performance or conduct; and defendants shall not issue any notice of reduction-in-force to any CFPB employee.” An appeals court order this month partially stayed that portion of the injunction, but only to the extent it would keep the CFPB from issuing a RIF that the agency determined “after a particularized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of defendants’ statutory duties.”
The union that brought the original complaint to stop the agency from being gutted filed a motion late Thursday asking the court to require the government to explain how the mass terminations don’t violate its preliminary injunction. “The plaintiffs have been told that entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the filing says. “It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not ‘interfere with the performance’ of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement.”
The agency is being dismantled by this administration, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren said was an assault on consumers and democracy.
The administration has sought to eliminate high-level agency officials responsible for maintaining the privacy and security of sensitive information it’s collected over the years. A lawyer for the National Treasury Employees Union said in a declaration that they were told that the privacy, security and Cybersecurity units of the agency would be eliminated.