Washington — A union representing employees across dozens of federal agencies filed two lawsuits on Sunday against the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with one seeking to block the apparent shutdown of the agency and another aimed at stopping Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing employee records and information.
The CFPB is an independent government agency established by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from corporate fraud and scams. President Trump named Russell Vought, the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Management and Budget, to run the CFPB on an acting basis after firing its previous director.
Over the weekend, Vought ordered the bureau’s staff to halt almost all of their work, continuing the administration’s ongoing blitz of the federal bureaucracy. Vought directed employees not to issue any proposed or formal rules, stop pending investigations and not open new investigations, halt all stakeholder engagements and abstain from issuing public communications.
In one of its lawsuits, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 155,000 federal employees across three dozen agencies and departments, asked the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to rule that Vought’s directive that CFPB employees halt work is unlawful. The lawsuit cited Musk’s Feb. 7 post on X, in which he wrote “CFPB RIP” with an emoji of a tombstone.
“CFPB employees have been placed in questionable status as they have been directed not to work but they have also not been formally placed on any authorized type of leave,” the NTEU said. “It is substantially likely that these initial directives are a precursor to a purge of CFPB’s workforce, which is now prohibited from fulfilling the agency’s statutory mission.”
The union asked the court to “[declare] that Defendant Vought’s directive to the CFPB’s employees to stop their supervision and enforcement work is unlawful” and “[e]njoin Defendant Vought from further attempts to halt the CFPB’s supervision and enforcement work.”
The second NTEU lawsuit suggests the administration has violated the Privacy Act, which prohibits CFPB from disclosing employee records, by granting DOGE access “without employee consent.” The suit asks the federal court in D.C. to stop CFPB from granting DOGE access to those records.
“CFPB has a statutory responsibility to protect the information that it collects and maintains about its employees from unlawful disclosure to third parties,” the suit said. “The Bureau has acted contrary to law and regulation by granting DOGE and its members access to the records that the Bureau collects and maintains about every CFPB employee.”
The CFPB was established through the Dodd-Frank Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in July 2010. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, spearheaded the CFPB’s creation.
The CFPB has been a sore point for conservatives ever since its founding, with GOP lawmakers saying it has issued burdensome regulations and rules. Supporters of the bureau point out that it has returned tens of billions of dollars to consumers through its enforcement actions.
A 2024 Supreme Court ruling upheld the constitutionality of CFPB’s funding structure, after challengers argued that its funding mechanism violated the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause. The court determined in a 7-2 decision that CFPB’s funding structure complies with the Constitution.
