The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may not proceed with agencywide job cuts, while a D.C. federal court weighs whether the terminations would violate a preliminary injunction blocking the agency from shutting down.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said from the bench Friday that a written order blocking the layoffs would come out later in the day.
The CFPB’s sudden move Thursday to terminate much of its workforce brought the agency’s leadership back to court, where Jackson said Friday she is willing to resolve the motion’s merits quickly but wouldn’t let the reduction in force plan go forward in the meantime.
The reduction-in-force notices sent to CFPB staff Thursday represent the Trump administration’s latest attempt to dismantle the agency, a longtime target of Republicans.
Until she can determine whether the CFPB’s actions were lawful, Jackson said she wouldn’t allow the CFPB to “disperse 1,400 people into the universe and have them be unable to communicate with the agency.”
A panel of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last week narrowed Jackson’s preliminary injunction blocking all firings, saying it was an overly broad measure to address the administration’s RIF plan.
The narrowed order permits the agency to terminate some employees during the trial-court proceedings, but only after “individualized” or “particularized” assessments to determine whether employees are necessary to perform the agency’s statutory duties, the appeals court said in the April 11 stay order.
During the Friday hearing, Jackson said that given the scope and speed of the layoffs, she was concerned about whether the agency complied with the narrowed preliminary injunction.
Emergency Motions
The National Treasury Employees Union and co-plaintiff groups who brought the suit against the Trump administration and acting CFPB head Russell Vought have argued that an order halting cuts was needed to prevent the agency from shutting down entirely, while CFPB leaders have framed the RIF as an effort to restructure and better align the agency’s priorities.
NTEU filed a motion late Thursday, demanding that the court order CFPB leadership to show how it hasn’t violated the terms of the injunction when it issued the RIF notices to as many as 1,483 of the agency’s more than 1,700 total staffers.
All affected employees were expected to be cut off from computer access by 6 p.m. Friday, which would amount to a functional work stoppage for the majority of CFPB workers, according to the plaintiffs’ motion.
“It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not “interfere with the performance” of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement,” NTEU said in its motion.
During the hearing, the NTEU submitted additional briefing in support of enforcing the preliminary injunction.
Jackson told the plaintiffs to submit evidentiary requests as soon as possible and gave the government until April 22 to file its opposition to the motion. Plaintiffs’ reply is due April 24, and an additional hearing will be held April 28.
A team from the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, has also targeted the CFPB for cuts, but their actions at the agency have also been challenged in court.
A federal judge on April 16 allowed a case to move forward with claims that DOGE exceeded its legal authority by attempting to access computer systems at the CFPB and other agencies.
The case is Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, hearing 4/18/25.
–By Olivia Alafriz and Ben Miller (Bloomberg)
