A federal judge in Washington has temporarily instructed the Trump administration to stop its efforts aimed at dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Friday, prohibiting officials from terminating employees, erasing data, or depleting its reserve funds.
This ruling followed a union’s lawsuit which claimed that the Trump administration intended to undermine the CFPB by laying off 95% of its workforce while also canceling the lease for its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Should this plan have succeeded, it would have reduced the agency responsible for overseeing how large banks and other financial service companies, including payday lenders and credit bureaus, treat their customers to a mere shell.
Currently, the CFPB is inactive after Acting Director Russell Vought mandated staff to refrain from nearly all work and remain at home this week. Additionally, it had initiated layoffs of numerous employees and began terminating contracts with vendors and expert witnesses.
Administration officials have been transparent about their intention to abolish the agency: Following an arrival of his DOGE team at the bureau’s headquarters last week, billionaire Elon Musk tweeted, “RIP CFPB,” and President Donald Trump informed reporters on Tuesday that it was “very important to get rid of.”
“It was also a waste,” he remarked. “There was a bad group of people running it. … That was a ruthless group of people. They caused a lot of damage.”
The temporary injunction issued by Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia will not reverse Vought’s work stoppage. However, the plaintiffs, which include a federal employees union as well as nonprofits collaborating with the CFPB, nonetheless celebrated this outcome.
“Eliminating this essential agency would significantly escalate fraud, the very issue Musk claims to be addressing, alongside amplifying scams, excessive fees, and various forms of exploitation,” stated Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the progressive organization Public Citizen, whose legal team represented some of the plaintiffs. “Today, a judge intervened to halt the unlawful actions by the administration to impede the vital operations of the CFPB.”
The lawsuit, which was originally filed on Thursday, contended that the extensive layoffs would render the bureau incapable of executing its fundamental functions as mandated by law. In a related filing, the former chief technologist of the agency cautioned that scrapping its internal data could irreparably jeopardize its capacity to monitor financial institutions and assist consumers.
“Trump and Vought’s measures to incapacitate the CFPB have already generated widespread confusion and inflicted considerable and irreversible harm on consumers nationwide,” the lawsuit claims. “Without immediate remedy, the defendants will persist in disrupting the lives of numerous civil servants.”
