Left for Dead, the C.F.P.B. Inches Back to Life

At the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, faint shadows above the entrance are all that remain of the letters that once spelled the agency’s name.

In the Trump administration’s broad dismantling of the federal government, the consumer bureau was one of the first agencies to fall, its offices shuttered and all 1,700 workers sent home. “CFPB RIP,’’ Elon Musk wrote on social media on Feb. 7.

But the consumer bureau has refused to die.

Last week, the agency’s consumer response team was called back to work to tackle a backlog of 16,000 complaints, including dozens from homeowners facing imminent foreclosures. The bureau’s Fair Lending Office has resumed preparing its annual report to Congress. And the front page of the agency’s website, which had generated a 404 error message starting on the day Trump officials arrived at the bureau, is working again.

The consumer bureau is emerging as a test case for the boundaries of Mr. Trump’s power to unilaterally hobble government agencies. For nearly a month, the bureau’s staff union and other groups have battled the Trump administration in federal court cases in Washington and Maryland, arguing that only Congress can formally close the bureau, which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

A consent order and series of short-term agreements have temporarily halted, and in some areas reversed, what Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia described as Trump officials’ “shoot first and ask questions later” approach.

But Judge Jackson has yet to rule on the larger question of whether the Trump administration can essentially end the bureau by hollowing out its operations, even if it technically stays open.