Speculation a month ago that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s planned relocation would result in widespread layoffs may have been valid.
The bureau on Tuesday sent a notice 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,” according to the notice, sent by Acting Director Russ Vought and first reported by Bloomberg Law. “Failure to respond by this deadline will be considered a declination of reassignment.”
Employees who agree to relocate will be officially reassigned to the new headquarters Sept. 6, Tuesday’s notice indicated.
The CFPB announced in May it would end remote work for agency employees – with few exceptions – and require senior leadership and supervisors to report to the 445 12th St. SW starting next Monday.
The roughly 650 bureau employees stationed within 50 miles of D.C. would then be expected to work from the new headquarters five days a week starting July 13.
The CFPB’s remaining staff comprises about 450 employees, typically close to the bureau’s former regional outposts in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta.
The catch, however, is that the new headquarters has space for roughly 550 employees – roughly half the number the CFPB employs.
The National Treasury Employees Union – which has been locked in a nearly 17-month court fight with the CFPB over various efforts by bureau management to cut its workforce – made several posts Tuesday and Wednesday, expressing disapproval toward this week’s notice.
“We all know what's really going [on] here,” the workers’ union posted to its Bluesky page Tuesday. “Vought's forced relocation of CFPB's dedicated staff is yet another ploy to fire workers and ultimately close the consumer watchdog.”
Vought told a podcast in October that the only people left at the CFPB were “our Republican appointees and a few career [employees] that are doing statutory responsibilities while we close down the agency.”
At the time, he estimated the agency would close “within the next two, three months.” Courts, however, have upheld a preliminary injunction preventing mass layoffs and forced the bureau to continue requesting an operating budget from the Federal Reserve.
The CFPB in March floated a revised staffing plan that cut the workforce to 556 – incidentally aligning with the new headquarters’ capacity. But an appeals court declined the bureau’s request for a quick ruling.
In a follow-up Bluesky post Wednesday, the NTEU called the notice to workers “another attempt in Vought’s yearslong crusade to drive workers out of public service.”
“Instead of pardoning corporate criminals and shrinking CFPB’s nationwide presence to just DC, we demand a CFPB that values its workers and serves all Americans,” the NTEU wrote.
“Just two weeks to decide whether to move our families across the country to DC???” the NTEU posted Tuesday. “Shameful and illegal!”
