A judge has paused the termination of nearly 1,500 employees from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) while she considers whether the Trump administration violated a court order to avoid mass layoffs. As CNN reports, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the mass reduction in force was “not going to happen” for now and scheduled an evidentiary hearing for April 28th.
The ruling should temporarily prevent the CFPB from being nearly eliminated, a move that CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought announced to employees yesterday. Documents filed in court indicate that cuts were supposed to eliminate 1,483 of the agency’s 1,690 employees, drastically reducing headcount in several departments, including consumer response and data protection teams. They were accompanied by a statement shifting the CFPB’s mission away from investigating digital payment platforms, medical debt, and several other areas.
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 (NTEU), which represents CFPB employees, said in a sworn declaration that they learned “virtually everyone” in the agency’s privacy, security, and cybersecurity units were told their jobs would be eliminated.
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. Judge Berman Jackson’s ruling in that lawsuit barred terminations unless they resulted from a “particularized assessment” of employees’ roles, something the NTEU says is highly unlikely to have taken place here. 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.
Erie Meyer, former chief technologist of the CFPB, tells The Verge that the layoffs threaten basic protections for Americans and their privacy. “With them firing every person in charge of protecting the data that the bureau has except for one person in cybersecurity, it’s officially open season on consumers and I’m extremely concerned about how vulnerable people are going to be targeted,” Meyer says.
