A federal judge in Washington temporarily ordered the Trump administration to halt efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Friday, barring officials from laying off staff, deleting data, or emptying its reserve funds.
The ruling came in response to a union lawsuit, which alleged that the Trump administration was planning to hollow out the CFPB by firing 95% of its workers while canceling the lease on its Washington, D.C., headquarters. If successful, the mass layoffs would have left behind only the skeleton of an agency charged with policing the way large banks and other financial services companies like payday lenders and credit bureaus handle customers.
The CFPB is currently shuttered after acting Director Russell Vought ordered staff to stop virtually all work and stay home from the office this week. It had also begun laying off dozens of staff and canceling contracts with vendors and expert witnesses.
Administration officials have been open about their goal of eliminating the agency: After members of his DOGE team arrived at its headquarters last week, billionaire Elon Musk posted, “RIP CFPB,” while President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that it was “very important to get rid of.”
“It was also a waste,” he said. “There was a bad group of people running it. … That was a vicious group of people. They destroyed a lot of people.”
The temporary order by Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia will not lift Vought’s work stoppage. But the plaintiffs, which include a federal employees union as well as nonprofits that work with the CFPB, nonetheless celebrated the development.
“Doing away with this critical agency would massively increase fraud, the scourge that Musk allegedly aims to curtail, along with supercharging scams, excess fees and charges, and assorted ripoffs,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the progressive group Public Citizen, whose attorneys represented some of the plaintiffs. “Today a judge halted the illegal move by the administration to stop the critical work of the CFPB.”
The lawsuit, originally filed on Thursday, argued that the mass layoffs would leave the bureau unable to perform its basic functions required by law. In an accompanying filing, the agency’s former chief technologist also warned that deleting its internal data risked permanently harming its ability to regulate financial institutions and assist consumers.
“Trump and Vought’s actions to disable the CFPB have already caused mass confusion and imposed significant and irreparable harm on consumers across the country,” the lawsuit states. “Absent immediate relief, the defendants will continue to upend the lives of countless civil servants.”
