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President Donald Trump is moving forward with his promise to slash a top federal consumer watchdog.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began sending termination notices to nearly 90% of its employees on Thursday night, slashing the agency spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2011 with the aim of preventing another financial crisis like the one that sparked the Great Recession.
Over the past decade, the CFPB has filed lawsuits against major companies, including student lenders and banks like Capital One, over accusations of predatory behavior. It has also returned billions of dollars to consumers and introduced new rules to crack down on medical debt and overdraft fees.
“I regret to inform you that you are affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” a copy of the notice viewed by Business Insider from Russell Vought, acting director of the CPFB and director of the Office of Management and Budget, said. “This RIF action is necessary to restructure the Bureau’s operations to better reflect the agency’s priorities and mission.
The notice added that employees will “retain access to work systems” until 6 pm ET on Friday, and that after that deadline, “system access will be discontinued, and you will be placed in an administrative leave status through your official separation date as outlined above.”
The National Treasury Employees Union wrote in a legal filing on Thursday that Vought sent reduction-in-force notices to “the vast majority of CFPB employees.” The notices, as first reported by Fox Business, went out to about 1,500 employees, slashing the agency’s workforce by nearly 90%. The CFPB sent those numbers to BI.
“As one would expect with a RIF of that size, the plaintiffs have been told that entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the NTEU wrote in the legal filing.
These termination notices come just one week after a federal judge ruled on April 11 that the CFPB could move forward with firing some employees deemed unnecessary to carry out the CFPB’s “statutory duties.” It followed an earlier ruling from a federal judge that froze the CFPB’s earlier attempts at terminations, calling them a “hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency entirely.”
Business Insider reported on Wednesday that the CFPB laid out new priorities for the agency in an internal memo sent to employees. The memo, viewed by BI, said the CFPB would “shift resources from enforcement and supervision that can be done by the States.”
That included plans to “deprioritize” student-loan oversight, medical debt, consumer data, and digital payments.
These changes are part of Trump and the DOGE office’s efforts to slash the government workforce to reduce spending. Elon Musk, DOGE’s unofficial leader, has previously said he wanted to “delete” the CFPB entirely, writing “CFPB RIP” in a February post on X.
Warren wrote in a statement on Thursday night that “Trump just gutted almost all CFPB staff, so the agency can’t do its job of helping Americans who get scammed by big banks and giant corporations.”
“Dismantling the CFPB in the face of a court order blocking an illegal shutdown is yet another assault on consumers and our democracy by this lawless Administration, and we will fight back with everything we’ve got,” she said.
The OMB and White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
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