A federal appeals court has blocked the Trump administration from slashing most of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s workforce, delivering a significant setback to efforts that aimed to reduce the agency to a skeleton crew.
The US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued the order in response to a legal challenge from the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal workers. The ruling effectively reinstates key elements of a preliminary injunction that sought to prevent the mass layoffs from going forward.
What was the plan, and why did the court step in
The administration’s original restructuring vision was aggressive. Plans targeted cutting the CFPB’s workforce from roughly 1,750 employees down to as few as 200.
Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought oversaw the restructuring push, which drew immediate legal challenges. The core legal question: whether gutting the agency’s staff effectively prevents it from fulfilling obligations Congress laid out in the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law that created the CFPB in response to the financial crisis.
