Durbin Joins Warren, Colleagues In Pressing Trump Administration On Impact Of Mass Firings At Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) joined U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, and 39 other Democratic Senators in a letter to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Acting Director Russell Vought outlining more than 80 congressionally mandated functions of the CFPB and pressing foranswers on how the agency would be able to fulfill them after firing almost the entire staff.
In the letter to Vought, the Senators wrote: “Last week, you tried to fire nearly all of the agency’s remaining 1,700 employees—the staff responsible for fulfilling the CFPB’s mission and statutory requirements to prevent Americans from getting scammed by big banks and giant corporations. Your hasty and unjustified mass firings are an illegal shutdown of the CFPB that will leave it unable to conduct agency actions that are required by law.”
The Senators continued: “You directed the gutting of entire divisions—including departments created by Congress to protect servicemembers and older Americans—attempting to leave a shell of only 200 employees to supervise and examine large financial institutions across the country, respond to millions of consumer complaints, answer the phone for hundreds of thousands of people seeking help, monitor emergency financial risks, and run all of the agency’s other operations.”
The Senators laid out in detail the impact the mass layoffs would have on specific functions of the CFPB––including firing all but one employee helping victims of scams in the offices focused on our nation’s two million service members and tens of millions of older Americans.
The Senators concluded: “We request that you provide—by April 30, 2025—a detailed accounting of each of the more than 80 statutory obligations of the CFPB, the number of employees assigned to each of those functions as of December 2024, the number of employees who would be assigned to each function if your rushed reduction in force were to go into effect, the immediate impact of such a reduction on the agency’s ability to perform each function consistent with federal law and federal court orders, and copies of any individualized or particularized analysis of those planned reductions on the agency’s work.”
A copy of the full letter is available here.
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