- Key insight: A federal judge ordered that no immediate job cuts or major operational changes can take effect until a permanent director weighs in.
- Supporting data: The CFPB has enough cash to maintain its current staff levels because about 600 employees have left the agency since the Trump administration took over.
- Forward look: The legal battle between the CFPB and its union is shifting from the courts to the Senate confirmation process.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will not cut its workforce for at least 60 days, until the confirmation by the Senate of a new CFPB director, under an agreement between the agency and the union that represents its employees. The rationale is to give the incoming director an opportunity to review a reduction-in-force plan and decide whether to pursue it.
On Thursday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ratified the agreement between the CFPB and the employees' union. The order grants a partial stay of the CFPB's reduction-in-force plan due to a pending change in the bureau's leadership.
President Trump has nominated Brian Johnson, a Capital One Financial executive and former No. 2 at the CFPB in the first Trump administration, to be the agency's permanent director. Johnson would replace acting Director Russell Vought, whose term ends Aug. 1.
Jackson ordered the stay to remain in place for 60 days after Johnson is confirmed by the Senate. If he does not get confirmed, the stay will remain in place until Jan. 3, 2027, the order states.
"Any proceedings about whether to modify, suspend, or dissolve the preliminary injunction in response to the Bureau's proposed 2026 reduction-in-force plan are stayed until 60 days after Brian Johnson is confirmed as director of the bureau," Jackson wrote in the order.
Jackson's order clarifies that the stay applies only to the CFPB's 2026 reduction-in-force plan, which the bureau and its union have been fighting over for the past 18 months. The battle between the CFPB and the union continues to represent one of the most consequential legal challenges in the Trump administration's effort to dramatically scale back an agency created by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis.
The immediate practical effect of the order is to shift the debate from the courts to the Congressional confirmation process. But the order does not state that the union will agree to whatever decision Johnson makes, assuming he gets confirmed.
"Rather than locking in a long-term restructuring now, the parties appear willing to let the next confirmed director determine the Bureau's direction," said Mike Canning, principal and founder of The LXR Group, a public policy consulting firm focused on financial services and capital markets.
"If both sides are effectively agreeing to defer major structural decisions until a Senate-confirmed director is in place, that's a recognition that these decisions are significant enough to warrant the legitimacy that comes with Senate confirmation," Canning said. "This suggests that the fight is becoming less about whether changes will occur and more about who gets to make those decisions. That's an important distinction from a governance perspective."
In March, the CFPB submitted a revised reduction-in-force plan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That 2026 plan would slash 53% of the workforce to align the agency with significant budget cuts by Congress and Trump administration's directives to "right-size" the bureau's operations.
Vought, who is also the director of the Office of Management and Budget, had previously proposed cutting the CFPB's staff to 556. When Vought was named acting director, the bureau had 1,750 employees. The bureau currently has 1,175 workers, with the reduction largely a result of employees choosing to leave their jobs.
In a separate development in the same case, CFPB Chief Financial Officer Ngagne Jafnar Gueye provided a declaration confirming that the bureau has sufficient funding to maintain its current workforce.
Last year, congressional Republicans slashed the CFPB's budget in half as part of President Trump's sprawling budget bill, capping its funding at $446.8 million in fiscal 2026, down from $785.4 million in fiscal 2024. The bulk of the bureau's budget pays for employee salaries.
"The CFPB now has enough budgetary resources at its disposal to continue performing its statutory responsibilities indefinitely at current staffing levels, and will continue to do so as long as increases in bureau spending (relative to FY26 levels) do not outpace the employment cost index," Gueye said in the declaration.
The CFPB's labor costs have plummeted due to natural attrition and "significant cost savings and efficiencies gained as a result of the bureau's leadership focus on responsible stewardship of public resources," Gueye said.
