At the head office of the Bureau for Financial Protection of the Consumer, weak shadows above the entrance are everything that remains of the letters that once spelled the name of the desk.
In the broad dismantling of the federal government by the Trump government, the Consumer Bureau was one of the first agencies that fell, the offices closed and all 1,700 employees sent home. “CFPB RIP,” wrote Elon Musk on social media on 7 February.
But the consumer agency has refused to die.
Last week the consumer response team of the office was called back to tackle a backlog of 16,000 complaints, including dozens of homeowners who are confronted with upcoming preventments. The Fair Lending Office of the Bureau has resumed to draw up his annual report at the congress. And the front page of the website of the agency, which had generated a 404 -error report, starting on the day that Trump officials arrived at the agency, works again.
The Consumer Bureau stands up as a test case for the boundaries of President Trump to unilaterally bump government agencies. For almost a month, the office of the office and other groups fought against the Trump government in the cases of the Federal Court in Washington and Maryland, with the argument that only the Congress can close the agency formally, which was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.
A consent order and series in the short term agreements have been temporarily stopped, and in some areas reversed, which judge Amy Berman Jackson of the American court for the District of Columbia described as the “Shoot First and Quest questions later” approach of Trump officials.
But Judge Jackson still has to rule on the greater question whether the Trump administration can essentially end the agency by carrying out its activities, even if it remains technically open.
The functions that have been restored are only a small part of the office workload, but the proponents of the consumer and the employees of the agency see these judicial orders as important victories in the broader effort to withstand the dismantling of Mr Trump of federal agencies.
Trump officials have made similar major movements at the United States Agency for International Development and, most recently, in the Education department.
For years, the financial sector has complained that the Consumer Bureau, which controls a series of credit activities, has been from mortgages to credit cards, has been exaggerated aggressively, binding companies in lawsuits and bureaucracy and credit from streams to consumers.
Now the struggle to save the agency has created a number of strange bedmates. Mortgage providers, who have traditionally been one of the groups drilled on the supervision of the agency, have also insisted that the agency is not closed, at least without careful planning, according to three people who are familiar with internal discussions at the agency.
The past month took place as a cat-and-mouse game between the Trump officers who want to kill the agency and employees and try to perform the legally required tasks of the agency, according to an assessment of internal e-mails from the office, testimonies from the court and interviews with eight current and former employees not to be identified to be identified.
The Trump government started going against the desk on Friday 7 February. That evening, Russell T. Vought – a 2025 -author project who said in 2023 that he wanted to conclude agencies and leave their employees “traumatically affected” – the name of the Bureau acting director.
In the coming days, Mr. Vought dedicated employees to “purchase from performing a work task” And ordered the termination of nearly 200 contracts with suppliers that offer vital pieces of the agency infrastructure, such as software for keeping legal affairs, as well as the contract with the personnel office that the entire team of customer service agents employed the hotline of consumer complaints.
But almost immediately Mr Vought's attempt came to prevent a complete closure of a roadblock that related to a mysterious characteristic of the mortgage industry.
The Consumer Bureau is responsible for compiling an important mortgage interest that has been released every week. Because lenders need that rate to certify that their loans are in accordance with the rules for safe loans, the mortgage market would freeze if the agency stopped publishing abruptly.
And so the new leaders of the agency allow employees to start that position again.
It was an early lesson for the Trump administration that the closing of an agency that is deeply intertwined in the American infrastructure of the American financial industry is a difficult task.
When the Congress founded the Consumer Bureau in 2011, the legislators assigned the more than 80 specific tasks. They include responding to complaints from consumers, running dedicated offices to serve members of the military service and borrowers of student loans, and enforcing federal laws for disclosures of mortgage loans, fair access to credit and other consumer protection.
Because they could not close the agency legally, Trump team officials concentrated on the population. Employees were told their new leaders that the office would 'survive only in name', said several in the court applications. One senior executive was quoted in the submission, because the agency would be reduced to “five men and a telephone” stored in a room somewhere in Washington.
On Thursday, February 13, the new leaders of the Office of the Office of Personnel Management asked to refrain from the usual notification of 60 days required for the government's dismissals.
The personnel office had never granted such exceptions before, deskmakers who have been testified in the court during the trial. But only 10 minutes after the agency sent his request, the personnel office approved its plan to cut an estimated 1,175 employees – the vast majority of its employees.
The purification would have wiped out every employee in different divisions, including the supervision, enforcement and research units of the agency.
Aware that the agency was in a race against the clock, the Deepak Gupta, a lawyer from the Union of the Bureau, sought a restrictive order in the federal court to prevent the termination of employees.
At 2 p.m. on Friday, February 14, Judge Jackson was planned to keep a hearing about Mr Gupta's request. Fifteen minutes before the hearing was set, Trump officials sent an urgent request for the last paperwork that was needed to perform the dismissals.
That afternoon in court, Mr. Gupta pushed the judge to freeze the mass termination.
“I don't want to leave the courthouse without any certainty,” he said. “I ask that they won't fire the entire desk tonight.”
Judge Jackson approved a consent order that paused the dismissed. Since then she has checked whether the Trump officials affect the 80-plus tasks that the congress had explicitly assigned to the agency.
Sometimes Judge Jackson has called on Mr Trump's officials to send conflicting messages.
One employee described receiving an e -mail from Mr. Vought team who instructs employees to continue “legally compulsory work” -then to get an SMS message from his manager on his personal phone and said, “Go to further notice.”
“We cannot have spent edicts with the fingers of people crossed behind their backs,” said Judge Jackson, at those stock exchanges, during a hearing on March 3.
Every week dozens of employees of the office have packed the courtroom of Judge Jackson to view the procedure, to occupy every available bank and bustle in an overflow space. Some notes of the scribbles so that they can pass on the latest developments to colleagues who follow group shits.
“We were there for witnesses,” said Catherine Farman, a web developer at the agency and the president of the Staff Union of the agency.
Judge Jackson could eventually lift the temporary freezing of the massive dismissals, so that many of the functions that have restarted are reversing. The next deadline for expanding or ending the break is planned for March 28.
Trump officials are prepared if Judge Jackson rules in their favor.
Adam Martinez, an operational officer at the Bureau who performs Mr. Vought's mandates, said on Tuesday in court that the stop-work order and blueprints for a massive dismissal had not been withdrawn. Planning meetings for the Purge Staf, another bureaal officer testified, were held as recently as March 6.
