A faint shadow above the entrance remains a letter at the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which once spelled out the name of the agency.
With the widespread demolition of the federal government by the Trump administration, the Consumer Affairs Bureau was one of the first agencies to fall, with the office closed and all 1,700 workers being sent home. “CFPB RIP,” Elon Musk wrote on social media on February 7th.
However, the Consumer Bureau refused to die.
Last week, the agency's consumer response team was called back to work to tackle a backlog of 16,000 complaints, including dozens of people from homeowners facing imminent foreclosure. The Bureau's Fair Lending Office has resumed preparing its annual report to Congress. And the front page of the agency's website that generated the 404 error message, which began the day Trump officials arrived at the station, is working again.
The Consumer Bureau has emerged as a test case for the boundaries of President Trump's power that unilaterally hinders government agencies. For almost a month, the Bureau's staff union and other groups have been fighting the Trump administration in federal court cases in Washington and Maryland, claiming that only the Bureau, created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, could be officially closed.
The consent order and a series of short-term contracts have temporarily suspended, and in some areas, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in the District of Columbia, overturned Trump officials' description of “first filming and asking questions later.”
But Judge Jackson still hasn't controlled the bigger question of whether the Trump administration can essentially end the bureau by shouting business.
The restored features are only a small portion of the agency's total workload, but consumer advocates and agency workers see these court orders as important victories in their broader efforts to resist the dismantling of Trump's federal agencies.
Trump officials have made similar drastic moves in the U.S. International Development Agency and more recently in the education sector.
For years, the financial industry has complained that the Consumer Bureau, which regulates various mortgage-to-credit card lending activities, has been overly offensive, linking businesses with litigation and deficits, and that credit is blocking the flow to consumers.
Now the fight to save the bureau has created some strange bed fellows. According to three people familiar with internal discussions at the Bureau, mortgage lenders, historically one of the broken groups in the Bureau's surveillance, are urging them not to close the agency without at least careful planning.
Last month, according to an internal department email, court testimony and reviews of interviews with eight current and former employees, it unfolded like a cat-mouth game between workers seeking to fulfill their duties as directors and workers seeking to carry out the agency's legally mandated duties.
The Trump administration began opposing the bureau on Friday, February 7th. That night, Russell T. Vought – in 2023, he closed the agency and stated that he wanted employees to be “trauma-affected” – was appointed as the agency's representative director.
Over the next few days, Vought ordered employees to “stop from performing work tasks,” ordered the termination of nearly 200 contracts with vendors that provide a critical portion of the agency's infrastructure, such as software to track lawsuits, and ordered contracts with staffing agencies that hired an entire team of customer service agents who responded to consumer complaints.
Almost immediately, however, Vought's attempts to shut down completely fell into obstacles related to the inexplicable features of the mortgage industry.
The Consumer Bureau is responsible for compiling the major mortgage rates released each week. The mortgage market will freeze if the bureau suddenly stops issuing because lenders need that rate to prove that the loan is in compliance with the safety lending rules.
So the new agency leader has allowed employees to resume their functions.
It was an early lesson for the Trump administration that closing institutions that are deeply woven into the infrastructure of the US financial industry was a difficult task.
When Congress established the Consumer Bureau in 2011, lawmakers assigned more than 80 specific obligations. These include handling consumer complaints, operating a dedicated office to provide services to military service members and student loan borrowers, and enforcement of federal laws governing mortgage lending disclosures, fair access to credit, and other consumer protections.
They were unable to legally close the department, so Trump officials focused on blocking it. The employee was told by the new leader that the bureau would survive “by name alone,” several said in court filings. One senior executive was quoted in the filing for saying that it would be cut down to “five men and phones” hidden in a room somewhere in Washington.
On Thursday, February 13, the department's new leader asked for permission from the Human Resources Administration to waive the usual 60-day notice required for government layoffs.
The Human Resources Bureau never admitted such exceptions. Bureau employees were involved in the process testified in court. However, just 10 minutes after the department sent the request, the HR office approved a plan to cut an estimated 1,175 workers. This is the majority of employees.
This purge would have wiped out all employees in several departments, including agency oversight, enforcement and research units.
The agency's recognition of the race against the clock, Deepak Gupta, the department's union lawyer, has sought a restraining order in federal court to prevent employee termination.
At 2pm on Friday, February 14th, Judge Jackson was scheduled to hold a hearing at Gupta's request. Fifteen minutes before the hearing began, Trump officials emailed the HR office an urgent request for the final documents needed to carry out the layoffs.
That afternoon, Gupta pressed the judge to freeze mass terminations.
“I don't want to leave the court without any guarantee,” he said. “We're asking them not to fire the entire agency tonight.”
Judge Jackson approved a consent order that suspends the layoffs. Since then, she has been monitoring whether Trump officials are working on more than 80 tasks Congress has explicitly assigned to the department.
Sometimes, Judge Jackson called out Trump officials for sending inconsistent messages.
One worker explained that he received an email from Voute's team instructing employees to continue doing “legally necessary work.” He then texted his manager over a personal call and said, “I'll fall until I get more notifications.”
“You can't have a dict order issued by people's fingers crossing behind their backs,” Judge Jackson honed at the March 3 hearing.
Each week, dozens of workers from the bureau pack up Judge Jackson's courtrooms to monitor minutes, occupy all available benches, and are crowded into the overflow room. Scribing out some doodle notes, they can relay the latest developments to colleagues following group chat.
“We were there to testify,” said Katherine Furman, the station's web developer and president of the institution's staff union.
Judge Jackson was able to eventually unfreeze the mass shootings and reverse many of the rebooted features. The next deadline for extending or ending the suspension is scheduled for March 28th.
If Judge Jackson supports it, Trump officials are prepared.
Adam Martinez, the department's operations officer who performed Voute's duties, told court Tuesday that the massive layoff suspension order and blueprints had not been revoked. The staff purge planning meeting, testified by another department official, was recently held on March 6th.
