Consumer protection employees describe DOGE, White House efforts to dismantle CFPB

WASHINGTON (CN) — Employees from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau testified Tuesday that the Trump administration planned to eliminate the agency the moment a federal judge lifted a court order barring its dissolution.

CFPB Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez, continuing his testimony from Monday, said that the Feb. 6 arrival of agents from the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency and their actions risked entirely sinking the consumer protection bureau created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“My concern was some of the things we were told to do by DOGE were irreparable from an operational standpoint,” Martinez testified on Tuesday. “When we talk about human capital, we talk about hostile takeovers, that’s what it felt like that week.”

DOGE agents were soon supervised by staff from the White House Office of Management and Budget, such as Mark Paoletta and Russell Vought, who were named CFPB general counsel and acting director on Feb. 8, respectively.

Martinez described them as the “adults at the table” compared to working with DOGE.

According to employee witnesses, even with White House staff now involved after Feb. 8, the agency still faced a complete shutdown.

One employee, using the pseudonym Alex Doe for fear of retaliation, testified Tuesday that DOGE staff tried to rush out a mass termination plan hours before a Feb. 14. emergency hearing before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee.

According to Doe, who was assigned project lead of the Reduction-in-Force team, DOGE staffers Jeremy Lewin and Jordan Wick set the Feb. 14th deadline without providing any justification.

Lewin and Wick repeatedly cited President Donald Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order, “Implementing the President’s ‘DOGE’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” and Vought’s Feb. 8 stop-work order as justification for the terminations, Doe said.

During a Feb. 13 virtual meeting, Doe testified that Lewin appeared to be speaking on behalf of Vought, who was just off screen, and pushed for the termination letters to go out on Feb. 14.

When she received an Office of Personnel Management memo outlining the planned terminations, Doe realized it would effectively wipe out the agency, leaving only a few staff members to carry out the terminations before they ultimately lost their jobs.

“The number of people being fired was shocking and upsetting,” Doe said.

She testified that conversations about conducting the termination plans continued minutes before and even hours after the Feb. 14 hearing and the resulting consent agreement preventing the mass terminations or destruction of agency data.

When she returned to work the following workday, Feb. 18, she was shocked to see such discussions as late as 10 p.m. on Feb 14, and told her supervisor, Martinez, that no termination effort could happen until the court’s next hearing on March 3.

“I hope Paoletta knows how to read a court order,” Doe testified she said.

She recalled a conversation with a CFPB senior advisor where she suggested that if Paoletta was going to order staff to violate the order based on DOGE’s instructions, he should receive that in writing because she doubted DOGE would stand up for him later.

In a Feb. 13 amended complaint, the National Treasury Employees Union warned that Vought ultimately planned to fire up to 95% of CFPB staff.

Matthew Pfaff, chief of staff of the Office of Consumer Response, testified Tuesday that a massive backlog had built up in the three weeks between Vought’s stop-work order and the first day members of his office were allowed to return to work on March 3.

According to Pfaff, during a March 4 meeting meant to assess the impacts of Vought’s order, a portal had over 16,000 outstanding consumer complaints that needed manual review, including 75 complaints warning of imminent foreclosures.

Pfaff, who had worked at the CFPB for over 11 years, said he had “never experienced a backlog like that before.”

The consent agreement between the union and the government remains in place.

Jackson indicated that agreement would stand until she ultimately issues a preliminary injunction and asked the parties to discuss what sort of narrow relief she could provide that would prevent the CFPB from being completely dismantled without effectively placing her in a supervisory role over the agency.

She said that testimony over the last two days have been “illuminating,” noting in an exchange with Justice Department attorney Brad Rosenberg that Tuesday’s testimony undermined his assertion that the agency was continuing its statutory functions.

Jackson noted that, while the agency could legally be dismantled, that could only be done via Congress, not at the White House.

“They have friendly houses of Congress on the Hill,” Jackson said. “I don’t think it’s up to the president and Vought, it’s not even up to the president and a new director."

Follow @Ryan_Knappy