The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is launching a plan next week to end telework for agency employees – with few exceptions – and reassign them to the bureau’s new headquarters, according to a Wednesday memo seen by Banking Dive.
The reassignments include roughly 450 CFPB employees who live outside the D.C. area – typically near the bureau’s former regional outposts in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta.
Some observers have suggested the relocation to 445 12th St. SW in Washington is an effort to further trim the CFPB’s workforce, which has fallen to about 1,100 employees from around 1,750 at the end of the Biden administration.
Employees will begin moving to the new headquarters – located in a less commuter-friendly area of the nation’s capital than the CFPB’s previous address near the White House – on Monday, according to the memo from Adam Martinez, the bureau’s chief operating officer.
Senior leadership and supervisors will report to work there beginning July 6. Then the roughly 650 bureau employees stationed within 50 miles of D.C. will be expected to work from the new headquarters five days a week starting July 13. The bureau’s remaining employees – those based elsewhere around the country – are expected to report to Washington by Aug. 31. Employees will receive official "move-in" orders by June 26, Martinez wrote in the memo.
There is a catch: The new headquarters has space for roughly 550 employees. Incidentally, that lines up with the 556 people the CFPB expects to employ under a workforce reduction plan it shared in March with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The bureau asked the appeals court to send its case back to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia within a 45-day window, with the hope that the workforce outline would persuade the judge there to lift a preliminary injunction preventing the CFPB from enacting widespread layoffs.
In an April filing, the National Treasury Employees’ Union, representing CFPB employees, pushed back against what it labeled an “artificial deadline” by which the bureau requested court action.
“This forced relocation ploy is illegal,” the NTEU wrote Thursday in a post on social media platform Bluesky, calling the move part of Acting Director Russ Vought’s “long-term effort to drive workers out of public service & close the CFPB.”
Vought said 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.”
