Judge Temporarily Halts Mass Firings At Cfpb, Preserves Agency Data

A federal judge Friday temporarily stopped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from continuing mass firings of employees, throwing up an initial roadblock to President Donald Trump’s fast-moving efforts to dismantle the agency.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked the CFPB from terminating additional employees after the Trump administration this week fired dozens of agency workers, including an entire team of people scrutinizing Big Tech companies’ financial products. The order blocks the CFPB from terminating any employee, other than for performance-related reasons or misconduct, or starting the process to lay off career agency employees.

In addition, Berman, an appointee of President Barack Obama, prohibited the Trump administration from destroying or removing any of the CFPB’s vast troves of data, which includes consumer complaints and sensitive information collected about how banks and other financial firms are complying with federal laws.

The order also blocks acting CFPB Director Russ Vought from taking steps to defund the agency, echoing a separate ruling by a federal judge in Baltimore on Thursday evening.

The Trump administration agreed to the temporary restrictions while the judge more fully considers a lawsuit brought by a CFPB employee union in the coming weeks. The judge set another hearing for March 3.

The National Treasury Employees Union, along with the NAACP and several consumer groups, had asked for the emergency order because it said it believed that Vought was planning to begin mass firings as soon as Friday that would encompass nearly the agency’s entire workforce.

Erie Meyer, who until last week was the CFPB’s chief technologist, wrote in a court declaration earlier Friday that she believed that the Trump administration was imminently seeking to destroy agency data. “Public reporting and reports that I have received from within the Bureau reliably indicate that databases holding the CFPB's data will soon be deleted,” she wrote.

On Thursday night, roughly 100 CFPB career employees who were employed for a fixed term received termination notices. Earlier this week, the Trump administration fired more than 70 CFPB employees who were still in a probationary period.

The order comes as the Trump administration has moved to tear down the CFPB in recent days, halting essentially all of the agency’s work, shutting down pending investigations and preventing any CFPB from monitoring whether banks and other financial institutions are complying with consumer protection law to stand down.

Trump and his adviser Elon Musk have both called for the elimination of the consumer bureau. Several members of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team have been embedded at the consumer bureau.