CFPB hiring litigation attorneys while cutting enforcement

Bloomberg News

• Key insight: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is recruiting for attorney-advisors within its Office of Litigation while simultaneously cutting enforcement attorneys. 
• What's at stake: The new hiring comes just two weeks after the CFPB provided a court with a new "reduction in force" plan, slashing the agency's staff in half. 

• Forward look: The success of the strategy — moving from aggressive enforcement to defensive litigation — is part of the agency's restructuring plan, which is under review in court. 

Just two weeks after announcing a plan to massively cut the staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency is hiring again — this time for attorneys who can defend the agency's new rules in court. 

A job for an attorney-advisor at the CFPB was posted on USAJobs, the website for government hiring. The job pays between $145,049 and $255,000 a year, depending on experience, and federal employees whose job, agency or department was eliminated get priority over other applicants. The post states that the job is to defend the agency in "a wide range of legal disputes, including defensive litigation relating to the CFPB's rulemaking activities."

In a bizarre twist, the CFPB has offered enforcement attorneys — whose staff policed the biggest banks and nonbanks for consumer abuses and which will suffer the largest cuts under a proposed reduction in force — the opportunity to move to the litigation section. The litigators being phased out of the enforcement division by the RIF could be the same ones filling seats in the bureau's litigation unit, assuming the court green-lights the agency's restructuring. 

In essence, the CFPB is cutting enforcement attorneys that police big banks, nonbanks and bad financial actors while simultaneously beefing up its legal defense for upcoming rulemakings. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the bureau has faced waves of job cuts and the bureau has sporadically sought to hire again. In October, the bureau sent an internal email to staff about job openings in the legal division of its Office of Litigation. 

Experts say the CFPB is preparing for the possibility that it will be sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, a 1946 law that ensures public notice-and-comment procedures for important agency rules and forbids agencies from issuing "arbitrary or capricious" regulations. 

The job opening is a non-bargaining unit position — meaning that it would not be represented by the CFPB union — which could be contributing to the lack of existing CFPB attorneys jumping at the opportunity, since accepting the position would mean leaving the union. The job also requires "continuous vetting," or automatic record checks, including enrollment in the FBI's Record of Arrest and Prosecution Back, or "Rap Back," service. That service gives CFPB management real-time alerts of any federal arrests, charges or convictions.

The CFPB wants to fire 620 employees and retain a staff of about 550 under a new reduction in force plan submitted in federal court. The plan was filed April 1 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a case brought a year ago by the National Treasury Employees Union. 

Under the new RIF plan, the CFPB's staff would be cut by 53% from current levels. When President Trump took office a year ago, the bureau had 1,723 employees. 

CFPB News & Analysis

CFPB firing line: DOJ moves to axe half the bureau's staff

April 1, 2026 3:56 PM

By Kate Berry

Russell Vought, the CFPB's acting director, is seeking to modify a stay that has kept the CFPB from firing any employees. Vought is trying to assert the White House's right to reorganize the agency at will by adopting a "revised" RIF. A previous plan that would have fired up to 90% of staff is now moot. In the litigation, the government appears to be trying to prevent the appellate court from issuing a definitive, precedent-setting ruling that could permanently limit the White House's authority to dictate size and scope of federal agencies. 

The bureau's litigation and rulemaking divisions have been busy rewriting rules promulgated under the Biden administration and defending new rules from legal challenges.  

Under former Director Rohit Chopra, the CFPB was sued in 2024 immediately after issuing a final open banking rule on personal financial data rights. Currently, the bureau is rewriting an 'interim' final rule on open banking, but has bypassed a second notice-and-comment period typically required for major rules — setting itself up for a likely APA challenge. The bureau has not given a timeline for issuing a final rule on personal financial data rights, according to court filings. The previous rule had required that banks and financial institutions make consumer data available free of charge to third parties. 

In addition, the CFPB is rewriting the small-business lending rule known as 1071 for its section in the Dodd-Frank Act. The rule was temporarily halted in 2023 after two Texas banks and four bank groups sued the CFPB to stop the data collection from going into effect. In November, the CFPB issued a dramatically scaled-back version of the rule aimed at reducing costs for banks and small-business lenders and excluded from reporting requirements a number of financial products including merchant cash advances, small-dollar business credit and all agricultural lending.

In the last year, the CFPB also has vacated former rules that were finalized under the Biden administration including the medical debt rule, nonbank registry rule and an overdraft fee limit rule. 

Going forward, the CFPB is waiting for a D.C. Circuit ruling on the union's lawsuit and whether the Trump administration can dramatically shrink the agency's workforce. The case is one of the most consequential legal challenges to the Trump administration's efforts to scale back an agency created by Congress.