Another federal workers union has found a judge to sign on to their latest complaint against the new Trump administration, this time at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), over the plans to reduce the workforce and cleaning up the agency’s radical leftist agenda.
via Politico:
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.
Here’s one of the union’s attorneys crowing about the order late on Friday:
In our suit over the CFPB, I’m thrilled to report that the court just issued an order against firings or reductions in force, destruction of data, or return of CFPB funds.
We had credible reports that RIFs were coming later today and that data destruction was imminent. pic.twitter.com/VbRzn0AC0Z
— Deepak Gupta (@deepakguptalaw) February 14, 2025
Readers might recall that after firing the agency’s director on Day One, President Trump named first Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as its acting director, then incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, took his place days later.
Vought, as my colleague Streiff wrote, swiftly put things in motion to slow the agency’s actions to a crawl, bringing with him the DOGE team. The agency’s website even went dark.
But, Vought did one more thing–he informed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in a Feb. 8 email that CFPB would not accept the next drawdown of payments.
Read More: Acting CFPB Director Freezes Funding for the Agency
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Website Goes Dark and the Woodchipper Warms Up
Then the firings began, as Streiff wrote in a follow-up piece on Friday:
Thousands of federal workers were dismissed Thursday as part of the first round of Trump’s reduction in the size of government. The dismissals targeted probationary employees, that is, those employees with less than two years of service, because they have little job protection.
Recent hires in probationary status do not maintain the same protections against firings as do most other federal workers, though they can still appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board if they allege the firings took place for partisan political reasons.
Earlier this week, OPM convened a call with federal agencies’ general counsels and instructed them not to pursue widespread firings of probationary period workers. Instead, OPM said, they should terminate only such workers that they have deemed poor performers.
Still, the dismissals have taken place on a widespread basis at least at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Small Business Administration, Education Department, General Services Administration and, now, OPM itself.
The action took place two days after a federal judge reinstated Trump’s buyout plan. Apparently, if a probationary employee had accepted the buyout, they were spared immediate dismissal.
Friday night, Jackson blocked CFPB Acting Director Vought from doing his job:
BREAKING
Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson just issued an order preventing the Trump administration from:
1. Deleting CFPB data
2. Firing CFPB employees
3. Transferring money from CFPB’s reserve fund
Right after the order was issued, nearly all CFPB employees were placed on… pic.twitter.com/Na1SuxxsTO
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 14, 2025
As one GOP senator recently noted, the truth is that consumers have many watchdogs looking out for them, and “to characterize it as ‘no one’s looking out for consumers,'” if the CFPB is not doing its usual work, “is inaccurate….and we ought not try to scare consumers right now”:
Let’s be clear: the Biden-era CFPB undercut consumers.
.@SenatorRicketts corrected the record: pic.twitter.com/L6A6AnGYXX
— U.S. Senate Banking Committee GOP (@BankingGOP) February 14, 2025
According to the Political report linked above, we’ll fortunately have a short wait until the next hearing:
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.
As this is a developing story, RedState will provide updates as more details become available.
