April 18 (UPI) — Judge Amy Burman Jackson, in an emergency Friday morning hearing, paused the Trump administration layoffs of 1,500 of the 1,700 workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Jackson ordered the administration to give unions and other groups who have sued documents related to the CFPB case. She said the mass layoffs won’t happen in the meantime.
The judge scheduled an April 28 hearing to hear testimony about the mass firings.
She is considering whether the mass layoffs essentially dismantling the agency violated her previous court order barring the layoffs and ordering reinstatement of previously fired CFBP workers.
At Friday’s hearing, Jackson said, “We’re not going to disburse 1,483 people into the universe and have them be unable to communicate with the agency anymore until we have determined whether that is lawful or not.”
The National Treasury Employees Union said in a statement that the CFPB issuing reduction in force layoff notices just days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered a “particularized assessment” first indicates that order has not been followed.
“For the CFPB to issue RIF notices-in which we are already identifying mistakes-to a large group of employees less than four business days from the D.C. Circuit order’s issuance indicates that CFPB has likely not made the required particularized assessments,” NTEU President Doreen Greenwald said.
Union attorney Deepak Gupta said the agency tried to time the layoffs so plaintiffs, “would not be able to come to the court in an orderly fashion” before employees’ computer access is shut off Friday.
An appeals court partially paused Jackson’s order, but it still prevents the bureau from conducting a reduction in force without the “particularized assessment” that the laid off employees are unnecessary to carry out the agency’s statutory duties.
The Trump administration contends it followed that procedure and went line by line through the CFPB’s business units. The union, however, insists the broad scope and fast speed means no such assessment occurred, warning in a filing Thursday that “entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person.”
The groups initially sued acting CFPB Director Russell Vought in February, accusing the Trump administration of attempting to dismantle the consumer watchdog.
Shortly after taking on the role, Vought ordered the CFPB’s staff to stop work, closed the agency’s headquarters and fired probationary and term employees.
Amid concerns that officials were poised to lay off the vast majority of the CFPB’s workforce in mid-February, Jackson temporarily barred the administration from firing staff without cause or conducting a reduction in force.
CFPB employees later testified to the court that top officials still planned to conduct mass layoffs, as the judge weighed whether to grant a broader injunction against the administration.
Mark Paoletta, CFPB’s chief legal officer, in a sworn declaration ahead of Friday’s hearing said the agency’s leadership determined that the CFPB should move forward with just 200 employees.
“An approximately 200 person agency allows the Bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy,” Paoletta wrote.
A CFPB employee who also filed a declaration with the court Friday painted a more frenzied picture of the push to cut agency staff led by a member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“DOGE member Gavin Kliger managed the RIF [reduction in force]. He kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday (April 17),” said the employee, identified as Alex Doe.
“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,” they added.
According to the legal brief, team members raised the concern that “there was a court order requiring they do a particularized assessment, but they were told that all that mattered was the numbers.”
Hundreds of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have received layoff notices in the latest attempt by President Donald Trump‘s administration to reduce the size and scope of the bureau.
The reduction-in-force notices, which were reviewed by NPR, Politico and The New York Times, were sent out to effected employees starting Thursday afternoon.
Russ Vought, acting director of the CFPB, wrote to the employees that the “action is necessary to restructure the bureau’s operations to better reflect the agency’s priorities and mission.”
The notices said the laid-off workers would lose access to email and work systems Friday evening and would officially be “separated” from their jobs in mid-June.
One CFPB employee who received a notice estimated to Politico that up to 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees could be affected by the layoffs, an estimation echoed by a Thursday evening legal filing by the CFPB’s staff union.
“Entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the Federal District Court filing reads.
The Trump administration previously moved to institute mass layoffs at the CFPB shortly after taking office earlier this year, but a federal judge ordered the employees to be reinstated, saying the action was outside the administration’s authority.
Parts of the federal judge’s decision were overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 11. The three-judge panel said the Trump administration could eliminate employees who are determined to be unnecessary to carry out the legally-mandated duties of the bureau.
Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, sent a memo to employees on Wednesday saying the bureau would be reducing enforcement work that could be left to state-level authorities. He wrote that the CFPB would “deprioritize” oversight in areas including student loans and medical debt.