The Trump administration has developed plans to slash two thirds of the workforce of U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), stepping back from previous efforts to cut it by 90%.
In a filing submitted Tuesday evening to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department said the new plans showed the administration will not shut down the CFPB entirely, as a lower court had found they planned to do.
Under the new plan, the bureau’s workforce would fall to 556 workers, fewer than a third of its size when Trump took office. It would also eliminate 85% of positions in the Division of Supervision, which oversees the conduct of banks and nonbank financial companies offering consumer services, and 80% in enforcement.
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The Justice Department said a lower court should be allowed to consider lifting a stay that currently blocks the administration from carrying out this plan. Until now, the administration has been battling in court to obtain permission to eliminate nearly all CFPB positions. Lawyers for an employee union, and others had argued would be illegal and would prevent the agency from fulfilling duties mandated by Congress.
Trump and top officials had called for the CFPB’s outright elimination, accusing it of politicized enforcement and unduly burdening companies. However, this has been criticized as an illegal giveaway to politically connected corporate actors that would jeopardize the public.
The latest motion would pause a pending appeal before the full bench of the appeals court, where judges had appeared skeptical of administration arguments that courts do not have the power to block the government from firing virtually all CFPB workers.
The CFPB is an agency created in 2010, following the 2007-08 financial crisis via the Dodd-Frank Act, which was designed to reform some of the predatory and deceptive financial industry practices that policymakers believed led to a wave of mortgage defaults, and ultimately to the crisis and subsequent Great Recession.
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The agency’s mission is to protect consumers in financial matters. It has been focused on creating and implementing rules designed to reduce unfair practices in the financial industry, addressing consumer complaints, monitoring the financial industry for potential risks, and offering financial tools and resources to consumers.
Rather than being funded through the Congressional appropriations process, the CFPB has been funded through requested money transfers from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a mechanism that has been called into question even before the Trump administration moved to strip the bureau of its funding in February 2025.