Two weeks ago, a three-judge panel from the federal appeals court in Washington lifted a freeze on firing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with some conditions. The judges, ruling on a Friday night, said that workers could be fired if agency leaders determined, after a careful assessment, that they were not needed to carry out the bureau’s legally required responsibilities.
Within hours, Trump administration officials — working closely with Elon Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency — scurried to fire nearly all the agency’s employees. By the following Thursday afternoon, bureau leaders sent termination notices to nearly 1,500 employees, retaining barely 200 people, and ordered that the fired workers’ access to agency systems be shut down the next day.
A judge has again stopped the cuts for now. But the details of what happened at the agency, which oversees banks and lenders and enforces consumer protection laws, will be vital to determining if the firings can proceed. Hundreds of pages of newly released agency records, supplemented by narrative accounts filed in court by more than 20 agency employees, were submitted ahead of a hearing this week before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington.
Judge Jackson halted the planned firings less than a day after the notices went out, saying that they went far beyond what the appeals court had allowed. Starting Tuesday, she will hold a two-day hearing to take witness testimony and decide whether to extend her order blocking the firings.
The consumer bureau has been on life support since February, when Trump officials arrived at the agency and began dismantling it. A series of federal court rulings prohibited the agency’s destruction. Congress created the agency in 2011 to add safeguards around mortgages and other consumer financial products, and only Congress has the power to abolish it.
Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer and the mastermind behind the termination plan, defended the firings, saying in a legal filing that they would “right-size” an agency filled with “vast waste.” Russell Vought, the White House budget office director who also serves as the bureau’s acting director, has called the bureau a “woke and weaponized” agency.
But firing so many workers at once, with no transition period, would destroy the bureau’s ability to operate, employees warned their bosses in emails, chat messages and verbal conversations, according to court records. Within days, critical technical systems would fail, enforcement lawyers would miss court deadlines and agency data that federal courts had ordered be preserved would be lost, they said.
“I don’t think we can keep operating even for 60 days without keeping many of these folks,” Christopher Chilbert, the bureau’s chief information officer, wrote in an email the day the terminations were announced.
Adam Martinez, the agency’s chief operating office, responded: “Understood and I do not disagree. We will really need to spend the next week figuring out a path forward.”
Judge Jackson has asked for the testimony of Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old associate of Mr. Musk’s who carried out the terminations.
Mr. Kliger, a former Twitter summer intern who had no experience in government work before this year, joined the Office of Personnel Management in January as a senior adviser. He has carried out assignments for Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in at least nine agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, where he is said to have been recently ousted from.
Emails sent in the hours after the appeals court ruled that staff cuts could move forward show Mr. Musk’s officials scrambling to fire people as quickly as possible — at times moving so fast they appeared to forget which agency they were focused on.
Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old lawyer who leads DOGE’s State Department foreign aid actions, sent an email on Saturday from his U.S. Agency for International Development email address laying the groundwork for the reduction in force, the government’s version of a layoff. In a nod to specific language in the appellate court’s order, Mr. Lewin wrote, “Director Vought’s team and I will conduct an individualized assessment to, consistent with the DC Circuit’s stay, ensure that only nonstatutory positions are affected.”
Mr. Paoletta said in court filings that he worked with two other lawyers to conduct a unit-by-unit evaluation of the consumer bureau and determined that the bureau could function without 90 percent of its current staff.
“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,” he said.
But emails and other agency records show that up until nearly the moment the termination notices were sent, bureau officials were still debating the numbers. On the Tuesday before the notices went out, some workers trying to prepare materials believed 485 workers would remain.
Trump officials wanted those slated for termination to be cut off from the agency’s systems less than 24 hours after receiving their layoff notice. One human resources worker involved in the planning asked a manager how people who were traveling and unable to check their email before losing access would be notified of their firing.
“Many people have asked that question. No one making decisions really cares,” the manager responded. “It makes me sad.”
In legal declarations totaling more than 100 pages, department heads — who said they were not consulted by the Trump officials before the firings — and other workers depicted the terminations as reckless and riddled with errors.
The one person Mr. Paoletta left in the Office of Servicemember Affairs, a legally required unit that aids military workers, had already accepted the government’s deferred resignation offer and would be retiring in September. He had turned in his work equipment and lost access to agency systems, workers said — meaning the office would be unstaffed if the firings proceeded.
The head of another legally required department said that he and all of his workers had received termination notices, despite Mr. Paoletta’s testimony that one worker had been retained.
“If there is such a person, that person has not reached out to me or, to my knowledge, to anyone else in my office to understand how we fulfill our statutory mandate,” the department head said.
