The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent reduction-in-force notices Thursday to roughly 1,500 of its employees, according to a motion filed in federal court.
Affected employees will lose access to CFPB systems, including email, at 6 p.m. Friday, according to the motion. Those employees will be placed on administrative leave, and their terminations will take effect in mid-June.
Such a move would leave the agency with a headcount of around 200, according to workforce figures reported in September.
The cuts come one day after the CFPB’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, said in a memo that the agency would pivot its focus away from non-depository institutions and shift enforcement and supervisory matters to states.
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month granted a preliminary injunction preventing the CFPB from issuing any reductions in force. However, an appeals court last week rolled back parts of that ruling, allowing agency leaders to terminate employees who have been “determined, after an individualized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of [the] defendants’ statutory duties.”
The appeals court decision also permits the CFPB to send RIF notices to employees deemed unnecessary.
“This RIF action is necessary to restructure the Bureau’s operations to better reflect the agency’s priorities and mission,” Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought wrote to affected employees Thursday, according to Bloomberg.
Attorneys for the National Treasury Employees Union are asking the district court now to order the CFPB to show cause that it has not violated previous court orders.
“These RIFs appear to go well beyond what the unstayed portions of this Court’s injunction permit,” lawyers for the NTEU wrote in their motion Thursday. “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.”
This is a developing story.
