Employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being toyed with as Donald Trump’s administration continues to hogtie the federal agency responsible for refunding more than $20 billion to defrauded consumers from greedy corporate malefactors.
These administrative games are happening as a federal judge weighs a case brought by CFPB union members challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the agency. Judge Amy Berman Jackson Monday was already showing impatience with the administration — publicly weighing her options from the bench to ensure that CFPB isn’t “choked out of existence before I get to rule.”
Shutting down the CFPB has been a joint obsession of Trump’s de facto head of government, Elon Musk, and Russ Vought, an architect of the reactionary policy playbook known as Project 2025, who is now a member of Trump’s Cabinet. As Musk, the head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), was tweeting “CFPB RIP” on Feb. 7, Vought took over as the acting head of the bureau and promptly shut off its source of funding. On Feb. 10, Vought issued a directive to employees to stop “any work tasks.”
Most of the professional staff has since been idled on administrative leave. (Vought also went ahead and ousted the agency’s “probationary” employees, who are either recent hires or had been recently promoted and therefore entitled to few worker protections.) A union representing the idled CFPB staffers has fought back, suing Vought, alleging that the work stoppage was an “unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’ decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.”
Vought sure looks like a man on a mission to kill the bureau. He has also dropped significant lawsuits, letting Capital One off the hook after CFPB had alleged the company cheated consumers out of nearly $2 billion in interest payments, as well as a suit against a subsidiary of Berkshire-Hathaway that CFPB had accused of trapping consumers in unfavorable mortgages. On Tuesday, he spiked another suit against three of the nation’s biggest banks for allowing fraud to flourish on their peer-to-peer payment system, Zelle.
As the Monday court proceedings were looming, Vought’s legal team at CFPB engaged in what looked like a mop-up job with staff. A Sunday memo was issued by Mark Paoletta, the agency’s new chief legal officer — and forwarded to staff by Adam Martinez, the agency’s chief operating officer. (That Paoletta — a Trump loyalist and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — is tasked to CFPB is another sign of the administration’s hyper-focus on the agency.)
Paoletta’s memo posed as if there had been an unfortunate confusion created by Vought’s stop-work order of Feb. 10. It pointed to a caveat in a previous Vought email that had mentioned employees continuing to perform duties “required by law.” Paoletta insisted that guidance was still in effect. “Many of you understood this,” Paoletta wrote, but he added: “It has come to my attention, however, that some employees have not been performing statutorily required work. Let me be clear: Employees should be performing work that is required by law.”
So cool. Back to work? Not so fast.
This supposedly clarifying guidance was almost immediately re-obfuscated in another directive, issued Monday, while court was in session.
Rolling Stone has received a copy of a memo written by Cassandra Huggins, a director of CFPB staff. Huggins told her reports: “We have requested and received clarification that [Paoletta’s] message was not intended to authorize reinstatement of supervision/examination activity, even though the Bureau is required by law to carry out these activities.” [Emphasis in the original.] It instructed CFPB’s examiners that they should not “resume any functions” and were to continue on “administrative leave.”
Rolling Stone reached out to Paoletta, Martinez, and Huggins seeking clarification of the confounding and seemingly contradictory memos. We did not hear back. (Huggins’ memo was first reported on by Bloomberg.)
In affidavits before the court, CFPB employees have called out Martinez for making representations to the court regarding exceptions to the work stoppage that ranged from “misleading” to “blatantly false.” The Huggins memo is only adding fuel to that fire — as the newsletter Popular Information reports.
Court hearings on this case will resume next Monday, March 10. Bring popcorn.
