Trump administration, Musk’s DOGE plan to fire nearly all CFPB staff and wind down agency, employees say
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Trump-appointed leadership plans to fire nearly all its 1,700 employees while “winding down” the agency, according to testimony from employees.
In a trove of statements released late Thursday, federal employees said that the mass layoff was discussed in meetings they attended this month with senior CFPB leaders and members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“My team was directed to assist with terminating the vast majority of CFPB employees as quickly as possible,” said an employee identified as Alex Doe, a pseudonym used out of fear of retaliation.
Doe said the plan from CFPB leaders and DOGE was to cut the bureau’s workforce in three phases. It would first eliminate probationary and term employees, then carry out a wave of about 1,200 layoffs, leaving a skeleton crew of a few hundred workers.
“Finally, the Bureau would ‘reduce altogether’ within 60-90 days by terminating most of its remaining staff,” Doe said.
The workers’ testimony comes at a crucial time for the CFPB, the agency created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis caused by irresponsible lending. Since DOGE operatives first arrived at the CFPB this month, the bureau has shuttered its Washington headquarters, initiated the first round of layoffs, and told those who remain to stop nearly all work.
The filings were made in the case started by a CFPB union that suspended acting Director Russell Vought’s moves to shutter the bureau. After the CFPB fired about 200 probationary and term employees, the agency’s actions were put on hold until a March 3 hearing.
The documents show an apparent disconnect between some of the external messaging from Vought and the behind-the-scenes activity at the bureau.
In a motion filed Monday in the case, Vought pushed back against the idea that he planned to eliminate the CFPB.
“The predicate to running a ‘more streamlined and efficient bureau’ is that there will continue to be a CFPB,” he wrote.
But the Trump administration’s plan was to take the CFPB down to the barest minimum staffing required under law: Just five CFPB employees would remain, either in a standalone office or folded into another regulatory body, the workers testified.
In meetings between Feb. 18 and Feb. 25, “staff were told by Senior Executives that the CFPB would be eliminated except for the five statutorily mandated positions,” said another current CFPB employee, this one identified as Drew Doe.
“One Senior Executive said that CFPB will become a ‘room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone in it,’” Doe said.
Another CFPB employee said that he or she attended a Feb. 13 meeting in which the bureau’s Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez stated that the agency was in “wind-down mode.”
The bureau has long been a target of Republicans and financial institutions, who have called it a rogue agency that exceeded its legal authority in punishing companies. More recently, Musk has taken up the cause; he posted on his X platform “RIP CFPB” earlier this month just as his DOGE operatives began their work.
In several instances in the testimony, senior CFPB staff appeared to defer to DOGE employees for critical matters. For instance, DOGE worker Jordan Wick “specifically stated” that the efficiency department wanted a massive round of layoffs by Feb. 14.
“The Bureau intended to comply and fire the vast majority of remaining employees on February 14th,” Alex Doe said. “The only reason it did not do so is because of this Court’s order temporarily prohibiting it from doing so.”
Despite gaining full access to CFPB systems and data on Feb. 7, the DOGE employes haven’t completed the required cybersecurity and privacy training required by the agency, the employees testified.
The CFPB employees said that, if directed to by the court, they would provide their names and titles under seal.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
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Thousands of consumer complaints unanswered after Trump CFPB purge, Dems say
WASHINGTON − Thousands of complaints submitted by Americans to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleging fraud or scams from private companies are going unanswered following President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the agency, Senate Democrats argue in a new report.
Their conclusion is based on publicly available data detailed in an analysis released Tuesday by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs led by ranking member Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
The CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Program ‒ established in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that created the agency ‒ serves as a clearinghouse for consumers to submit complaints online, by phone or mail about financial products and services. After the CFPB screens the complaints, they are sent to companies for a response.
Since its founding, the CFPB has returned more than $21 billion to consumers who were victims of fraud or scams.
More:No more consumer protection? What the CFPB shutdown means for you.
During the final three months of former President Joe Biden’s administration, the CFPB uploaded and publicized a daily average of 10,609 complaints received by consumers. During the same period, the CFPB submitted an average of 10,596 complaints to the companies that were named, according to data on the bureau’s website.
But the processing has dropped significantly under Trump.
The agency uploaded a daily average of 7,853 consumer complaints over the 10 days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Feb. 3 ordered the bureau’s staff to stop much of its work. Five days later on Feb. 8, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the bureau, ordered CFPB staff to “cease all supervision and examination activity” and “cease all stakeholder engagement.”
Since Feb. 13 ‒ following mass firings at the CFPB pushed by Vought ‒ the bureau has uploaded just 2,234 complaints a day, according to the report. Historically, the CFPB receives about 350,000 monthly complaints ‒ a pace far greater than the number processed so far this month.
More:US consumer watchdog signs come down at Washington HQ
Between Feb. 3 and Feb. 13, the CFPB submitted a daily average of 7,519 complaints to companies. The daily average of complaints submitted to companies has dropped to 2,067 since Feb. 13, a decline of 80% from the pre-Trump rate.
“Consumers in need of help are seeing their complaints go unanswered,” the report says.
Spokespeople for the OMB did not respond to a message from USA TODAY seeking comment.
The report’s release comes ahead of a forum of Democratic senators Warren is convening Tuesday to highlight the consequences of Trump’s efforts to eliminate the CFPB. Top Trump advisor Elon Musk, who has vowed to destroy the bureau through his Department of Government Efficiency, was invited to the forum but is not expected to attend.
Warren, who led the CFPB after it was created during the 2007-2009 Great Recession, requested information Tuesday in a letter to Vought on the number of bureau employees responsible for keeping the complaint database, as well as potential terminations of those involved in the processing of complaints and a tally of the overall complaints the agency has received since its dismantling began.
More:Judge blocks mass layoffs at consumer protection agency targeted by Trump
“With work at the agency effectively halted, it is unclear whether the CFPB still has the staff,financial, technological, and other resources necessary to keep its Consumer Complaint Program operational,” Warren said in the letter co-signed by Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who also sits on the baking committee.
“We are deeply concerned about the implications of your efforts to gut the CFPB onour constituents, who rely on the CFPB and its partner agencies to advocate on their behalf,” the letter says.
The bureau’s biggest enforcement action was in 2022, when it ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and restitution for what it said was widespread mismanagement of mortgages and accounts that cost customers their homes and cars and locked people out of their own bank accounts – with more than 16 million consumers affected.
The CFPB, formed to protect consumers against fraud, has long drawn criticism from Republicans and the financial industry. Efforts to dismantle the agency come as the DOGE, led by multibillionaire Musk, has worked aggressively to cut government spending and reduce the federal workforce.
Trump this month said it’s his goal to full eliminate the CFBP, alleging “waste fraud and abuse” in the agency. A federal judge on Feb. 14 ordered the Trump administration to halt the firing of CFPB employees for now until the court takes up a request for a temporary injunction from unions seeking to stop the purge.
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
Since its founding, the CFPB has returned more than $21 billion to consumers who were victims of fraud or scams.
Why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being targeted by Trump, DOGE
By Lesley Stahl, Aliza Chasan, Shachar Bar-On, Jinsol Jung
February 23, 2025 / 7:00 PM EST / CBS News
In the weeks since President Trump’s return to office, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, long a target of conservatives, landed in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency.
As a watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, is tasked with protecting consumers from financial fraud and shady lending practices. Musk has criticized the agency, which would oversee one of his new ventures. Now its head has been fired and workers have been told to stay home. Doors have been locked and all work has ceased.
Rohit Chopra, the fired head — who previously served at the Federal Trade Commission under Mr. Trump during his first term in office — said he sees the targeting of the CFPB as “suspicious”; It’s a small agency that oversees some of the biggest and most powerful companies out there, including big banks and tech companies moving into financial technology.
“They would want a situation where the agency is a lapdog rather than a watchdog,” Chopra said.
Mr. Trump, in the Oval Office earlier this month, said it was his goal to fully eliminate the CFPB “because we’re trying to get rid of waste fraud and abuse.” Getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse is a job the president handed to Musk and DOGE.
But eliminating an agency that regulates tech companies creates a potential for conflicts of interest for Musk, especially given the secrecy around DOGE — something Musk refutes.
“I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization,” Musk said in the Oval Office on Feb. 11.
He said it would be obvious if he was doing something that would benefit one of his companies. However, it’s not obvious or transparent to many. A team of young men — connected with DOGE — was given wide access to the bureau’s computers, but the American public doesn’t know what they’re looking for or what they’re doing with the access to these files.
Hanna Hickman, who was a bureau attorney until she was fired less than two weeks ago, said she’s heard DOGE workers are camped out in the CFPB basement.
“They’ve got papers up on the windows to keep people from looking in. And they’ve been accessing data, certainly,” she said.
In recent years the bureau started aggressively policing digital banking companies and products. So it has a lot of information on its computers about them, which is potentially relevant to Musk because he announced that he’s starting a new digital payment platform, X Money.
“He’s potentially able to gain access to files of his competitors like Venmo and Cash App. He is able to take out the regulator that would’ve been the watchdog for his company,” Hickman said. “I guess it’s easier to fire us than it is to beat us in court.”
A senior White House official told 60 Minutes that Musk is not in the inner workings of the DOGE operations at CFPB. The team working there take their orders from the acting director of the bureau. The official declined to comment on what specifically the team of young men was doing at the bureau.
But according to several sources, the team was granted unprecedented access to the CFPB data systems, including to sensitive bank records — access that normally requires training and background checks.
Hickman said every employee at CFPB has to go through an extensive background check.
“It includes a detailed run of our background, fingerprints, talking to neighbors and friends to make sure we are who we say we are,” she said. “It’s a process that takes at least a couple of months before you’re hired.”
The CFPB’s chief operating officer gave a sworn declaration saying the DOGE team members were “provided privacy and cyber security training” and signed non-disclosure agreements.
In response, the CFPB’s chief technologist, who just resigned, wrote that the training alone would be insufficient, noting that there was also “no mention of DOGE employees undergoing a background investigation.”
Lorelei Salas and Eric Halperin, among the highest-ranking civil servants at the CFPB to leave the bureau, said they were horrified by the idea of people rummaging through the bureau’s confidential files. After they were placed on administrative leave, both resigned.
“I’m worried about your account number, your social security number being out there,” Salas said.
Halperin, who was in charge of all the bureau’s lawsuits on behalf of defrauded consumers, said companies would want the information the CFPB has to stay private.
“We do have information – both proprietary business information, trade secret information and personal identifiable information for consumers that we collected in the course of our work, that was necessary to do our work,” Halperin said.
Salas ran a team of nearly 600 inspectors who examined the books of banks and other financial institutions. She pointed toward the development of artificial intelligence tools used by companies to make decisions about whether or not to give someone a loan. Those algorithms are in the CFPB system, Salas said.
“I think that companies that gave us their financial information and even trade secrets, they will probably be harmed if that information fell into the hands of competitors,” Salas said.
Three hours after the DOGE team swept in on Feb. 7, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X, alongside a picture of a gravestone. Mr. Trump appointed Russ Vought, an ardent critic of the bureau, as its acting director. Vought announced on X he would stop funding the agency.
“This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” Vought said.
Soon, the firings started. Hickman and nearly 200 of her colleagues found out through a mass email.
“We virtually shut down the out-of-control CFPB, escorting radical-left bureaucrats out of the building and locking the doors behind them,” Mr. Trump said last week. “What they were doing was so terrible. Where they were spending the money was so terrible.”
Late last week, workers took down the signage at CFPB’s headquarters, even though a federal judge imposed a temporary restraining order to stop budget cuts at the bureau and any more firings. A hearing is set for March 3.
The judge’s order does not cover those already fired, like Hickman, who says she did not receive any severance pay.
“Under the normal regulations governing a government layoff, we should receive at least 60 days’ notice, severance, benefits to help us transition into a new role,” Hickman said. “It’s shocking.”
Hickman said her union is fighting back.
“We are looking for all legal avenues to pursue this,” Hickman said. “At the end of the day, the administration thinks they can get away with it because they don’t think we have any recourse. So I’m hoping to prove them wrong.”
The watchdog agency, created by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who’s now leading the uphill fight to keep the bureau alive.
“For every person who wants to buy a home without getting scammed, this fight is your fight,” she said at a recent protest.
Norbert Michel, of the Libertarian Cato Institute, agrees with the president that there are too many financial regulatory agencies. He said there are enough regulatory agencies out there and doesn’t believe CFPB should have ever been created.
“Consumer protection existed long before we had a CFPB,” Michel said. “And if we got rid of it and put everything back to the way that it was, we would still have consumer protection.”
Functions assigned to the bureau could be assigned under the Federal Trade Commission, he said.
“Their motto is literally on the website, ‘Protecting America’s consumers,'” Michel said.
Still, the bureau, in its short existence, has recovered over $20 billion for consumers.
As of now, CFPB investigations and nearly all lawsuits brought by the agency are frozen. And Chopra says no refund checks to defrauded consumers are going out. He doesn’t even know if the bureau really exists right now.
“All I know is that a lot of employees are being told to stay silent and stay home,” Chopra said.
He also doesn’t know where Congress is in all the chaos around the agency. He argues only Congress has the legal authority to shut down an agency it created.
“You can’t just say, ‘We’re gonna pass these laws to protect consumers,’ and then act like the agency is a dead fish,” he said. “That’s not how the Constitution works.”
One of America’s most recognized and experienced broadcast journalists, Lesley Stahl has been a “60 Minutes” correspondent since 1991.
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