Dive Brief:

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Acting Director Russ Vought on Friday submitted a request to the Federal Reserve for $145 million in funding.
• That’s the amount the agency needs to carry out its duties for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, Vought said in a letter sent to Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The request was filed by Justice Department attorneys Friday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Vought has been engaged in a legal back-and-forth with the National Treasury Employees Union for nearly a year.
• Vought’s capitulation followed a Dec. 30 court order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson that the CFPB must continue requesting funds from the Fed.

Dive Insight:

In the Friday letter, Vought noted he disagrees with Berman’s opinion and order as it relates to the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s determination that “combined earnings” refers to the Fed’s profits. 

In November, the OLC argued that the CFPB could not legally request funds from the central bank because the Fed had no profits. Berman, in her Dec. 30 order, called that “flawed reasoning.”    

“The defendants are unabashedly trying to shut the agency down again, through different means,” Berman Jackson wrote last month. “It appears that defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to achieve the very end the court’s injunction was put in place to prevent.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Act requires the Fed to transfer quarterly an “amount determined by the Director to be reasonably necessary.”  

Vought has repeatedly tried to decimate the CFPB since he took charge of the agency in February 2025. He has pursued mass layoffs at the CFPB, dropped a number of its lawsuits and enforcement actions, and made clear his desire to shutter the bureau sooner than later.

“We want to put [the CFPB] out and we will be successful probably within the next two or three months,” Vought said on an October podcast. Berman Jackson quoted that insight from Vought in her Dec. 30 order. 

CFPB architect Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, on Friday called out the administration’s repeated attempts “to kill” the agency over the past year.

Vought “was forced to request funding for the agency because we fought back in the courts,” Warren, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a Friday statement. “We’ll stay in the fight to stop [President Donald] Trump and Vought from shutting down the CFPB and abandoning Americans who get scammed out of their money.” 

In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to rehear the National Treasure Employees Union’s case against Vought next month, and vacated a three-judge panel’s August 2025 decision that reopened a path to mass layoffs at the agency. Oral arguments are set for Feb. 24.

Vought may have requested the funding to avoid an argument at that hearing “that he just wants to shut down the bureau,” Joseph Sanders, partner at law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson, said in a Monday email.

“He needs the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to lift Judge Jackson’s injunction. Taking steps to violate that injunction will play into the hands of the plaintiffs,” Sanders said. “Vought only requested funding through March 31 (Q2 FY 26), so this preserves the argument that he just wants to streamline the Bureau, not kill it, while also keeping the agency on the fiscal tipping point should another opportunity arise to use the ‘earnings’ argument.”

Plus, the clock is running on Vought’s position as acting director of the CFPB, noted Hinshaw & Culbertson partner Brian Turetsky. The Senate returned Stuart Levenbach’s nomination to be CFPB director without action on Jan. 3, capping Vought’s tenure at the bureau at Aug. 1.

“The Vacancies Reform Act only allows the extension of the Acting Director through two nominations and Levenbach’s was the second,” Turetsky said in an email. “Vought may not want to lose the appeal and have the injunction hanging over his last months at the CFPB. Requesting funding for one quarter furthers that goal.”