The CFPB Has Been Gutted
More than 1,400 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) workers were terminated from their positions on Thursday amid a broader Trump administration shakeup at the independent government agency, sources tell WIRED. There were around 1,700 employees in total at the CFPB.
The mass reduction in force, or RIF, comes nearly a month after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from removing probationary employees at the CFPB and other agencies. On Friday, an appeals court ruled that the CFPB could begin terminations again so long as “individual assessments” were conducted for each terminated employee. Around 200 employees will be left at the CFPB, effectively gutting the agency Elon Musk has previously said should be ‘deleted.’
In an email sent to CFPB staff on Wednesday, CFPB chief legal officer Mark Paoletta announced that the agency would be shifting its focus away from its supervisory roles and towards “tangible harm to consumers.” Medical debt, student loans, consumer data, and digital payments have all been identified as topics the CFPB will “deprioritize,” according to the document.
“As far as I can tell it affects literally every office to at least some extent with at least some of them fully wiped out,” says one terminated CFPB worker. “My guess is by the end there will be just a few leadership positions remaining plus skeleton crew for very obviously legally required functions of the bureau.
The CFPB was established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, an expansive piece of legislation that imposed consequential regulatory reform in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The agency was created to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive financial practices, and it claims to be responsible for $19.7 billion in consumer relief since its inception, as well as $5 billion in civil penalties
“They didn’t follow the CBA [collective bargaining agreement], aren’t following Dodd-Frank, and did not provide sufficient notice to anyone,” claims a CFPB employee who lost their job on Thursday.
Musk and other conservatives have called for the CFPB to be destroyed for some time. The Project 2025 chapter on financial regulatory agencies describes it as “a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency” and calls to have it abolished. In February, Musk wrote “RIP CFPB” with a gravestone emoji in an X post. In November, he posted, “Delete CFPB.”
In February, WIRED reported that three DOGE operatives, including Gavin Kliger and Nikhil Rajpal, were given access to the CFPB’s HR, procurement, and financial infrastructure. The DOGE workers were later granted access to all of the agency’s systems on Friday, Bloomberg reported, including bank examination and enforcement records. Further requests for DOGE access continued throughout the month.
“Don’t pay attention to what they say about the CFPB, pay attention to what they’re doing,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, the corporate power director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement responding to the cuts on Thursday. “And what they’re doing is systematically gutting all efforts to protect service members, and all Americans, from fraud and scams while simultaneously letting Wall Street, Big Banks and Big Tech off the hook.”
Additional reporting by Zoë Schiffer.
