The agency plans to shift its focus as it begins to lay off staff
The Trump Administration’s Consumer Protection Bureau redirected and is looking for a new home – but no sign of reorientation
Employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have begun receiving layoff notices, the latest attempt by the Trump Administration to shrink the bureau and reduce the scope of its work.
The notices, seen by NPR, state that the bureau’s operations have to be restructured in order to better reflect their priorities and mission.
Staff members began receiving the reduction-in-force notices on Thursday afternoon. It was not immediately clear how many of the agency’s employees were receiving the notices.
The panel otherwise left intact a separate federal judge’s injunction that prevents the agency from being dismantled — including that its data cannot be deleted or destroyed, and that employees must be given workspace or the tools to work remotely.
The bureau’s legal officer said in the memo that states would be asked to carry out more enforcement activities because it would allow the agency to focus on harms to consumers.
He added the bureau would “deprioritize” a number of areas it has regulated in recent years, including medical debt, peer-to-peer platforms, and digital payments.
The last item is notable as Elon Musk, who has tweeted “CFPB RIP”, is building a digital payments platform –- a platform that would ostensibly be under CFPB’s oversight. The DOGE team took control of the bureau’s key systems in February after entering the Washington headquarters.
The US’s consumer protection bureau, which was formed after the 2008 financial crisis, is being attacked by the Trump administration and some on Wall Street who say it overreaches in its regulation.
The bureau was criticized for reorientation that marked a significant retreat in its mission.
CFPB Employee Reduction Inforcement Action, and a First U.S. Supreme Court Decision to Cut Off a Core of Consumer Protection
“The CFPB cannot simply shirk the consumer protection responsibilities Congress gave it and expect states to enforce federal law,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.
is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She was at CNBC writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
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 motion was filed after the union learned how the mass firings don’t violate the 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. When the Bureau cut its staff by 90 percent in 24 hours, without prior notice to anyone else, it would not interfere with the performance of its statutory duties.
“We will fight back”, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, who helped establish the agency.
