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Emails and testimonials from workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau document the administration’s efforts to lay off 90 percent of the employees.
April 27, 2025, 6:24 p.m. ET
Two weeks ago, a three-judge panel from the federal appeals court in Washington lifted a freeze on firing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with some conditions. The judges, ruling on a Friday night, said that workers could be fired if agency leaders determined, after a careful assessment, that they were not needed to carry out the bureau’s legally required responsibilities.
Within hours, Trump administration officials — working closely with Elon Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency — scurried to fire nearly all the agency’s employees. By the following Thursday afternoon, bureau leaders sent termination notices to nearly 1,500 employees, retaining barely 200 people, and ordered that the fired workers’ access to agency systems be shut down the next day.
A judge has again stopped the cuts for now. But the details of what happened at the agency, which oversees banks and lenders and enforces consumer protection laws, will be vital to determining if the firings can proceed. Hundreds of pages of newly released agency records, supplemented by narrative accounts filed in court by more than 20 agency employees, were submitted ahead of a hearing this week before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington.
Judge Jackson halted the planned firings less than a day after the notices went out, saying that they went far beyond what the appeals court had allowed. Starting Tuesday, she will hold a two-day hearing to take witness testimony and decide whether to extend her order blocking the firings.
The consumer bureau has been on life support since February, when Trump officials arrived at the agency and began dismantling it. A series of federal court rulings prohibited the agency’s destruction. Congress created the agency in 2011 to add safeguards around mortgages and other consumer financial products, and only Congress has the power to abolish it.
Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer and the mastermind behind the termination plan, defended the firings, saying in a legal filing that they would “right-size” an agency filled with “vast waste.” Russell Vought, the White House budget office director who also serves as the bureau’s acting director, has called the bureau a “woke and weaponized” agency.
