One day after the Trump administration sent layoff notices to the vast majority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s workers, a federal judge temporarily blocked the action and ordered a hearing to determine whether the attempted mass firing violated an injunction she imposed last month.
In a brief court session Friday morning, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington pressed Justice Department lawyers for details about layoff notices sent Thursday to nearly 1,500 of the consumer bureau’s 1,700 workers. The messages told workers that they would lose access to their email accounts and work systems on Friday evening.
Judge Jackson issued an oral order, followed by a written one, barring the government from carrying out that plan until at least April 28, when she plans to hold an evidentiary hearing on the issue. Her ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the consumer bureau’s staff union and other parties.
“Once again, the court is confronted with evidence that gives rise to concerns that there will be no agency standing by the time it gets to consider the merits,” she said in her written order.
Russell T. Vought, director of the White House budget office, became the consumer bureau’s acting director in early February and immediately began dismantling the agency — which cannot be closed without congressional action. Judge Jackson issued an injunction last month freezing those actions, saying that she wanted to make sure the agency existed long enough for courts to evaluate whether Mr. Vought’s actions were lawful.
One week ago, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit pared back Judge Jackson’s order and said Trump officials could fire workers whom they decided — after a “particularized assessment” — were not needed to fulfill the agency’s legally mandated responsibilities.
In a court filing on Friday, Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer, said he and other lawyers had studied the issue and determined that only 200 workers were essential. Cutting 90 percent of the bureau’s staff would “right-size” an agency filled with “vast waste,” Mr. Paoletta said.
Many mandatory departments — including those that focus on fair lending, service member affairs, student loans and protections for older Americans — could be appropriately staffed with only one employee, he said.
Agency workers painted a starkly different picture in their own court filings on Friday. Multiple division heads said they were not consulted about the cutbacks and could not see how such a small work force could handle the agency’s myriad required tasks.
The firings were being carried out in a rush by Gavin Kliger, an associate of Elon Musk, according to a sworn statement from a bureau employee whose name was omitted in the court filing because she said she feared retaliation.
Mr. Kliger has been detailed to various agencies since President Trump took office, including the consumer bureau. He was recently pushed out of his role at the Internal Revenue Service amid a clash between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Mr. Musk, the billionaire businessman whose allies have been slashing the federal work force.
Mr. Kliger “kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday,” the consumer bureau employee said, referring to Thursday. “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent.”
Representatives of the consumer bureau, and Mr. Kliger, did not respond to requests for comment.
Judge Jackson made it clear at Friday’s hearing that she had little faith in the government’s assurances that the termination order was carefully planned and would not prevent the agency from fulfilling its core duties.
She also suggested that the government might have violated her injunction, even after its modification last week by the appeals court.
Trump officials appeared to have simply dusted off and implemented their previous plans to functionally obliterate the agency by firing nearly all of its staff, and in so doing, they seemed to be “thumbing their nose at both this court and the court of appeals,” Judge Jackson wrote.
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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