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Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) believe that newly appointed director Jonathan McKernan will lay off almost all of its roughly 1,700 staff in an effort to “carry out the closure of the agency.”
In an exhibit filed Thursday as part of the National Treasury Employees Union’s (NTEU) lawsuit against the Trump administration, current and former CFPB employees testified that new leadership at the agency is terminating necessary contracts “wholesale” and taking actions that result in “harm that can’t be undone once final.”
Should McKernan proceed with the plan, it would fulfill a mission outlined in Project 2025 and achieve the Trump administration’s long-sought goal to get effectively neuter the bureau.
CNBC was first to report the story.
The CFPB has been in a state of chaos since President Donald Trump fired then-director of the agency Rohit Chopra at the beginning of February.
Since then, the agency has had two acting directors — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Project 2025 architect Russel Vought — and McKernan confirmation hearings are underway. Mark Calabria, the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has also taken an interim role at CFPB as part of his larger post at the Office of Management and Budget.
Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again mass firings, steep budget cuts and Elon Musk’s access to its data have led to a bevy of lawsuits against not only the CFPB, but Trump, his administration’s cabinet secretaries and most if not all of the departments of the federal government.
And like at other departments, the CFPB has had to backtrack on some firings. An email obtained by Bloomberg Law on Thursday showed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) direct the CFPB to reinstate veterans who were fired.
Even this week there’s been a flurry of activity at the CFPB. The agency dropped lawsuits that have been a thorn in the real estate industry’s side, one being against Rocket Mortgage and the Jason Mitchell Group over an alleged kickback scheme and another against Capital One for allegedly cheating consumers out of interest payments on savings accounts.
In McKernan’s hearing on Thursday, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Democrats on the panel grilled him on his plans for CFPB, particularly Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was instrumental in the CFPB’s creation in 2010.
“Mr. McKernan, you’ve been nominated to run this agency where Elon Musk has told everyone to do nothing,” she said. “It kind of feels like you’ve been lined up to be the No. 1 horse at the glue factory.”
Pressed on whether he would continue the CFPB’s protection for senior citizens from financial abuse, he answered in the affirmative, though if the agency is shut down entirely, it’s not clear how.
Documents in the NTEU lawsuit suggest that whatever is left of CFPB could be folded into another department such as the Federal Reserve, Treasury or the White House.
