The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is transferring all of its active litigation to the Justice Department, according to separate statements Thursday from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, and the workers union representing the agency.
Further, Mike Salemi, the CFPB’s acting enforcement chief, said at an all-hands meeting Thursday that, as he understood it, all bureau employees would be furloughed at the end of the year, Government Executive reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Salemi hedged, saying he was not privy to all of the plans, but that the information came from an associate general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget who also serves as a senior legal adviser at the CFPB.
The timeline, if true, would dovetail with a projection CFPB Acting Director Russ Vought made in a podcast appearance last month, when he said the only employees left at the bureau were “our Republican appointees and a few career [staff] that are doing statutory responsibilities while we close down the agency.”
“We want to put it out – and we will be successful probably within the next two, three months,” Vought said.
Further, DOJ attorneys filed paperwork last week with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, indicating the CFPB “anticipates exhausting its currently available funds in early 2026.”
The filing was meant to flag a “potential lapse in appropriations” to pay the bureau’s operating expenses. The court this year granted a preliminary injunction preventing the CFPB from firing the vast majority of its staff.
Included in the filing was a memo the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel sent Vought, asserting that the bureau may not legally request funds at this time from the Federal Reserve under the Dodd-Frank Act.
Salemi on Thursday said the 170 employees in his division were slated for an unpaid leave designation, according to Government Executive.
A few top officials may have the opportunity to work for DOJ, American Banker reported, citing people who were part of the all-hands call.
Salemi noted that the DOJ stood up an enforcement and affirmative litigation unit within its Civil Division in September. Salemi told CFPB staff he assumed the agency’s work would be routed there beginning in 2026, according to Government Executive.
Cat Farman, president of the National Treasury Employees Union 335, which represents CFPB employees, said Vought has “no legal authority” to transfer the bureau’s cases to the DOJ.
“This is Russ Vought’s latest illegal power grab in his ongoing plan to shut down the CFPB,” Farman said in a statement on the NTEU’s website.
However, the Dodd-Frank Act indicates the DOJ has the authority to handle cases where no agency is designated to do so by law, Bloomberg Law reported. Before the CFPB was established in 2011, the DOJ took cases under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act because no other agency had the power.
The CFPB is still litigating 13 cases, Farman said, though Vought this year has dismissed 22 enforcement actions brought by the bureau under previous administrations.
“CFPB attorneys are afraid DOJ will dismiss [the remaining] cases,” Farman said.
The DOJ declined to comment. The CFPB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, Warren, the senator credited as the architect of the bureau, appeared to hold tight to her suspicions.
“Donald Trump and Russ Vought are racing to shut down the CFPB while their lawyers tell the courts the opposite,” Warren wrote in a statement Thursday. “Nobody is fooled about the Trump-Vought end game, and the courts must uphold the law.”
