Hundreds of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees filed back into the office this week for the first time in years. Hundreds more, scattered across the country, are being told to move to Washington by Nov. 2 or lose their jobs.
That’s a move workers and their union say is a mass layoff by another name.
Roughly 650 CFPB employees who live in the Washington region and had largely been teleworking returned to the bureau’s new and smaller headquarters in Southwest Washington, where they must now work at least half the time.
An economist based in the Washington area, granted anonymity for fear of reprisal, said the first day back was “pretty good,” outside of “the court cases, violations of the collective bargaining agreement and state of democracy.”
The remaining 450 employees face the fall deadline to relocate or go. Few expect many of them will.
“They know that the vast majority of people won’t be able to move, so it’s just a RIF in disguise,” said an examiner in the San Francisco Bay Area who has spent 11 years at the bureau and was granted anonymity for fear of retribution, using the government’s shorthand for a reduction in force. “It’s a way to fire people without firing them.”
The examiner said he has limited mobility and cares for a mentally disabled family member. “They’re just forcing me to retire is what they’re doing if I can’t move,” he said. “If we don’t win something further beyond the November date, I’ll just have to go ahead and retire.”
Chuck Werner, a software engineer in Pittsburgh who has been at the CFPB for more than a decade, said he will decline the order when it comes due. His medical issues and his retired parents nearby, he said, make a move to Washington unworkable.
The bureau, which polices banks and lenders for deceptive practices, has been a target of President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans since its creation. Russell Vought — the acting CFPB director, who also runs the White House Office of Management and Budget — called it a “woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy” last year, and echoed that line on Capitol Hill this week while presenting the agency’s semiannual report. For more than a year, Vought has pursued Trump’s goal of shuttering the bureau, an effort federal judges have largely blocked.
The relocation orders went out June 30, in letters and emails reviewed by MS NOW, citing the memorandum ending remote work that Trump signed on his first day in office. Employees were initially given two weeks to decide, then an extension to July 21, and finally — after the union representing them reached an agreement with Vought — until Nov. 2.
“This illegal forced relocation is another attempt in Vought’s years-long crusade to drive workers out of public service and close the CFPB,” Cat Farman, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement.
The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on employees’ contention that the return-to-office plan is a means of thinning its ranks. The agency has set a target of 556 employees over the next year, down from 1,074 today.
Some of that contraction has already happened in practice. The examiner said he has not conducted an on-site exam in 18 months. In past years, he was part of teams that completed five or six annually.
“We’re the agency that polices them and makes sure they follow the law and don’t rip consumers off, so they don’t like us around,” he said.
Werner said the bureau’s leadership has made his job harder in a different way. He helps design and manage the CFPB’s website; over the past several months, he said, his team has stripped it of all non-English resources and taken down thousands of pages created before Trump’s second term, at the administration’s direction.
“We’ve been asked to make some changes to the site that are due to the policy of this administration, and that’s what we’ve been doing,” Werner said. “I may not agree with it. I don’t really understand the direction of it. That’s not a thing that I talk about at work.”
Hundreds of employees have resigned rather than wait to be cut, while others have taken buyouts, or as Werner put it, settled into a state of permanent “limbo.”
Vought has defended the changes as a rollback of “regulatory overreach” while “remedying tangible harms that are clearly within the CFPB’s statutory authority.” On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Trump’s overhaul has cost Americans as much as $26.5 billion.
All three CFPB workers in this story received termination notices last year, during a mass restructuring that brought sweeping reductions in force and a near-total halt to the bureau’s operations. The union and the administration have been litigating the president’s authority to fire career civil servants en masse ever since.
For now, the union has stalled the plan to cut the workforce by more than half while the administration works to confirm Brian Johnson, Trump’s nominee to run the bureau. Both sides have agreed that Johnson, if confirmed, should get to review the 2026 reduction-in-force plan and decide whether to proceed. Not everyone is reassured.
“They’re two peas in a pod,” the examiner said of Vought and Johnson. “I know a lot of other examiners are hopeful and crossing their fingers because he worked for us before under the first Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean anything. I fully expect him to continue trying to shut us down.”
“It’s an awkward position to be in because you stay for lots of reasons,” Werner said. “I believe in the bureau’s mission because I imagine a future where it goes back to normal, when I feel like I’m making a difference, and I want to see that future.”
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