April 18 (UPI) — 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.
