Mass layoffs paused at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET April 18

A federal judge on Friday temporarily paused layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that impacted the majority of the banking regulator’s workforce.

District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that Thursday’s RIF notices sent to more than 1,400 CFPB employees could have violated a court order restricting removals at the agency. 

“[T]here is reason to believe that the defendants simply spent the days immediately following the Circuit’s relaxation of the Order dressing their RIF in new clothes, and that they are thumbing their nose at both this Court and the Court of Appeals,” she wrote. 

Berman Jackson on March 28 largely blocked the Trump administration from laying off CFPB employees, but a circuit court on April 11 partially stayed her order by allowing for RIFs after officials conduct an individual assessment to determine if the employee is necessary to fulfill the agency’s statutory responsibilities.  

A hearing is scheduled for April 28. 

Earlier Friday, an anonymous member of the CFPB RIF team submitted a declaration under penalty of perjury that Gavin Kliger, a Department of Government Efficiency official, kept staff up for 36 hours straight so that the RIF notices would go out on Thursday. 

“Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent,” the individual wrote. 

Kliger is a computer scientist who graduated college in 2020 and “has boosted white supremacists and misogynists online,” according to Reuters. 

The anonymous individual, who apparently has been excluded from RIF team meetings since testifying in court, also said staff were told to ignore the individual assessment requirement. 

The National Treasury Employees Union on Thursday requested that the Trump administration show it hadn’t violated the court order.

“It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not ‘interfere with the performance’ of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote.

This story has been updated with information from the judge’s order.