'Fire people without firing them': CFPB workers get an ultimatum
Source: MS NOW News
Jul. 17, 2026, 3:50 PM EDT
Hundreds of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees filed back into the office this week for the first time in years. Hundreds more, scattered across the country, are being told to move to Washington by Nov. 2 or lose their jobs. That’s a move workers and their union say is a mass layoff by another name.
Roughly 650 CFPB employees who live in the Washington region and had largely been teleworking returned to the bureau’s new and smaller headquarters in Southwest Washington, where they must now work at least half the time.
An economist based in the Washington area, granted anonymity for fear of reprisal, said the first day back was “pretty good,” outside of “the court cases, violations of the collective bargaining agreement and state of democracy.” The remaining 450 employees face the fall deadline to relocate or go. Few expect many of them will.
“They know that the vast majority of people won’t be able to move, so it’s just a RIF in disguise,” said an examiner in the San Francisco Bay Area who has spent 11 years at the bureau and was granted anonymity for fear of retribution, using the government’s shorthand for a reduction in force. “It’s a way to fire people without firing them.”
Read more: https://www.ms.now/news/cfpb-vought-consumer-firing-employees-relocation-mandates-shutter-agency
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Chump would like nothing more than to shut down the CFPB completely, or else to hobble it from overseeing the financial sector.
From Wikipedia:
The agency was originally proposed in 2007 by Elizabeth Warren while she was a law professor and she played an instrumental role in its establishment. The CFPB's creation was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession, and is an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve.
Since its founding, the agency has returned more than $21 billion to consumers who were defrauded by financial institutions. The agency has established or proposed rules to cap overdraft charges and credit card late fees; prohibit medical debt from credit reports; limit the ability of data brokers to sell personal data; and limit predatory payday loan practices. The agency is funded through penalties collected with its enforcement actions and through transfers from the Federal Reserve.
Throughout its existence, the CFPB has been persistently targeted by Republican politicians and the financial industry. The CFPB's status as an independent agency has been subject to many challenges in court. In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the president can remove the director without cause but allowed the agency to remain in operation. In 2024, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the CFPB funding mechanism prescribed by Congress. At the outset of his second presidential term, Donald Trump appointed an acting director who immediately ordered the CFPB to stop regulatory activity, and sought to fire 90% of the agency's staff.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
Chump would like nothing more than to erase all the achievements of the Obama years, and the CFPB is a major achievement.
