Days after Trump administration officials fired almost 200 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and ordered the rest to stop their work, a federal judge on Friday ordered a temporary halt to the agency’s dismantling.
Lawyers representing the bureau staff’s union filed court papers early Friday seeking a restraining order to prevent what they described as an imminent dismissal of nearly all employees and the deletion of critical agency data from its computer systems.
“I’m asking that they don’t fire the entire agency tonight,” Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing the union, said in a court hearing on Friday afternoon. “I don’t want to leave the courthouse without some assurance that the mass layoff is not going to happen and then become a fait accompli, and then the government is going to argue, ‘Well, we’ve done it already.’”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington urged Mr. Gupta and a lawyer for the government — Brad Rosenberg, who has worked at the Justice Department for more than 17 years — to work out a deal to delay job cuts and other major actions.
Mr. Rosenberg, who was assigned the case Friday morning, said he needed time to consult with his bosses and see what they would allow him to do. After a delay of more than an hour, he and Mr. Gupta reached an agreement to halt any data erasure and further job cuts until early March.
Judge Jackson signed an order instructing officials at the consumer bureau to not “delete, destroy, remove or impair any data.” It also blocks the agency from firing employees en masse or issuing a “reduction in force” notice — the process the government follows for layoffs — to any consumer bureau employee.
Agency workers, including some who were listening to the hearing remotely, expressed immediate joy and relief.
The consumer bureau has been in a state of crisis since last Friday, when President Trump appointed Russell Vought, the director of his Office of Management and Budget, as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Vought immediately closed its headquarters for the week and ordered its 1,700 employees to stop nearly all of their work.
On Tuesday, Mr. Vought dismissed at least 70 probationary employees — generally people with less than two years of service — and on Thursday, he fired around 100 fixed-term employees.
“Remember those technologists I hired using an authority designed to bring private sector tech talent to gov?” Erie Meyer, the agency’s former chief technologist, posted on social media. “They were looking into big tech. Trump just fired them. All of them.”
In court papers filed Friday morning, Ms. Meyer, who resigned from the bureau last week, said she had received reports from people within the bureau that digital agency records were about to be deleted. A half-dozen people from Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency team — which is not a formal executive branch department — arrived at the consumer bureau’s headquarters last week and gained access to its computer systems.
There is “an imminent risk that all of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s data — that is, 12 years of data from activities across the agency — is at risk of being deleted,” Mr. Gupta said in court on Friday afternoon. “If that is deleted, it is irretrievable.”
In a sign of how fast things have moved, Judge Jackson said that in just seven days, “the agency’s been largely dismantled, and it’s going to be dismantled if seven days more go by.”
Court actions have begun to slow that destruction.
Mr. Vought said on social media last week that he would eliminate the agency’s funding — which comes from the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional appropriations process — to cut off the “spigot” of money to what he called “a woke & weaponized agency.”
But on Thursday, the agency agreed in a legal filing in a separate case, being heard in federal court in Baltimore, to hold off for at least two weeks on emptying the agency’s reserve fund and returning the money to the government. Judge Jackson’s order Friday also blocked the agency from relinquishing its funds.
Things at the consumer bureau appear likely to remain tumultuous for the near future, though. On Friday afternoon, right as the court hearing wrapped up, the agency’s remaining employees received an email notice ordering them to “exercise administrative leave until otherwise instructed.”
And employees are still waiting to find out if they will have an office to go back to. Rumors spread among workers this week — and were cited in court filings in the union’s lawsuit — that Trump officials had asked the General Services Administration to terminate the consumer bureau’s lease on its Washington headquarters.
Asked whether that was true, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration said the agency would not have an answer to that question until next week.
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