A federal judge Thursday granted a partial stay on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s latest workforce-reduction plan so the agency’s potential future director can review it.
The stay will continue until 60 days after Brian Johnson, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the CFPB, is confirmed, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered. If Johnson is not confirmed by Jan. 3, 2027, the stay will expire.
No hearing for Johnson had yet been scheduled with the Senate Banking Committee as of Monday morning. Nominees to lead financial regulators generally must gain approval from the majority of the committee before moving on to a confirmation vote by the full Senate.
Thursday’s order stemmed from a joint motion filed by Justice Department lawyers, representing CFPB leadership, and the National Treasury Employees Union, representing the bureau’s workforce. The two sides have been locked in a 17-month court battle over repeated attempts by Trump-era CFPB leadership to drastically reduce the agency’s workforce or force the bureau’s closure.
The CFPB in March proposed cutting its workforce by 53%, arguing the bureau couldn’t continue staffing at current levels because the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July 2025, reduced the amount of funding the agency could request to 6.5% of the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses.
An appeals court in June denied the CFPB’s request for a quick ruling on the plan, upholding a preliminary injunction Berman Jackson put in place last year.
In a status report Thursday, CFPB CFO Ngagne Jafnar Gueye told Berman Jackson the agency “now has enough budgetary resources at its disposal to continue performing its statutory responsibilities indefinitely at current staffing levels, and will continue to do so as long as increases in Bureau spending (relative to [fiscal 2026] levels) do not outpace the employment cost index.”
Gueye credited “significant cost savings and efficiencies gained as a result of the Bureau’s leadership focus on responsible stewardship of public resources,” and “natural attrition.”
The CFPB counts roughly 1,100 employees. That’s down from about 1,750 at the end of the Biden administration.
However, the bureau in May said it would end telework for agency employees – with few exceptions – and reassign them to the bureau’s new headquarters, which has space for roughly 550 employees.
That is forcing employees stationed near the bureau’s former regional outposts in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta to consider their future.
CFPB Acting Director Russ Vought sent a notice last month to employees based outside the Washington, D.C., area, giving them until July 14 to decide whether they will agree to work from the agency’s new headquarters.
“Declining a management-directed geographic reassignment will result in your separation from the CFPB,” Vought wrote at the time. “Failure to respond by this deadline will be considered a declination of reassignment.”
Vought’s term as acting director expires Aug. 1.
In Thursday’s joint motion, the CFPB said giving Johnson a chance to review the workforce-reduction plan would “serve judicial efficiency.”
Mike Canning, a public policy consultant and founder of the LXR Group, called the CFPB and NTEU’s alignment notable.
"If both sides are effectively agreeing to defer major structural decisions until a Senate-confirmed director is in place, that's a recognition that these decisions are significant enough to warrant the legitimacy that comes with Senate confirmation," Canning told American Banker. "This suggests that the fight is becoming less about whether changes will occur and more about who gets to make those decisions."
Under Berman Jackson’s order, the CFPB and NTEU must file a joint status report within seven days of Johnson’s confirmation, or by Jan. 10, 2027, if he is not confirmed.
