The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Thursday to a large swath of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just days after a federal appeals court pared back an injunction that had prevented the agency’s leaders from carrying out plans to fire nearly all of the bureau’s workers.
The full scope of the cuts were not immediately clear, but by late afternoon, hundreds of workers across all of the agency’s major divisions had received reduction-in-force notices. Fired employees were told they would lose access to their email accounts and the agency’s work systems on Friday evening.
A legal filing Thursday evening by the consumer bureau’s staff union estimated that the terminations could hit as many as 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees. “Entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the union said in its filing to the Federal District Court in Washington.
Representatives of the consumer bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
The bureau, which was created by Congress in 2011, monitors banks and other lenders. Since it was established, the watchdog agency has returned $21 billion to defrauded consumers through refunds and debt cancellation, according to government figures.
On Wednesday, Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer, sent an all-staff memo laying out new priorities. The bureau will significantly reduce its enforcement and compliance examination work, and “deprioritize” oversight of student loans, medical debt, digital payments and peer-to-peer lending, he wrote.
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office leader who is also the consumer bureau’s acting director, has frozen nearly all of the agency’s activity and sought to eliminate almost all of its staff.
In mid-February, his team was hours away from terminating 1,200 workers before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington intervened. In response to a lawsuit brought by the consumer bureau’s staff union and other parties, Judge Jackson last month imposed an injunction preventing Mr. Vought from mass firings.
That was necessary, she said, to mitigate the “substantial risk that the defendants will complete the destruction of the agency completely in violation of law well before the court can rule on the merits, and it will be impossible to rebuild.”
But on Friday, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated parts of her injunction and said the Trump administration could fire employees whom it had determined — after “a particularized assessment” — are not needed to carry out the agency’s legally mandated duties.
Workers in various departments — including supervision, enforcement, research and operations — said on Thursday that it seemed like the overwhelming majority of the agency’s staff had received termination notices.
Elizabeth Bond, who has worked at the bureau for nearly 12 years, received her termination notice while on maternity leave. She said she was “heartbroken” after conversations with co-workers who said her entire team had been eliminated.
“No one will be protecting consumers and looking out for their best interests,” said Ms. Bond. She noted that her team would have had part of the agency’s oversight responsibility should Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Trump overseeing the efforts to drastically cut the federal work force, follow through with his plans to add a payment system to X, his social media platform.
In its court filing on Thursday, the bureau’s staff union asked Judge Jackson to investigate whether the terminations violated the remaining parts of her injunction. The union said it was “unfathomable” that cutting 90 percent of the agency’s staff in 24 hours would not interfere with its performance.
The union added that it was implausible that the government had complied with the appeal’s court’s requirement it conduct a “particularized assessment” of each employee’s role since the ruling was issued on Friday.
Stacy Cowley is a business reporter who writes about a broad array of topics related to consumer finance, including student debt, the banking industry and small business.
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