Dozens of CFPB Workers Fired in After-Hours Blitz

WIRED

12-02-2025

Makena Kelly Dhruv Mehrotra Feb 11, 2025 10:41 PM Some affected employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were notified with an email that addressed them as [EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division]. The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, DC. Photograph: Getty Images
Dozens of Consumer Finance Protection Bureau employees were terminated on Tuesday evening, sources tell WIRED.
The cuts largely targeted contractors and so-called probationary employees, workers who have served less than two years at the agency. Sources tell WIRED that the CFPB's enforcement division was hit hard, but it's unclear how many employees were let go.
Workers were informed that they had been fired with a frenetic email delivered around 9pm ET on Tuesday night. An evidently failed mail merge meant that some affected employees were addressed as [EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division].
'This is to provide notification that I am removing you from your position of [Job Title] and federal service consistent with the above references,' the email from acting chief human capital officer Adam Martinez says. 'Unfortunately, the Agency finds that that [sic] you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency's current needs.'
The firings follow a tumultuous few days at CFPB. On Friday, staff for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency shut down a portion of the agency's homepage after a day of struggling to obtain access to the CMS and other systems. WIRED reported last week that three DOGE staffers, including Gavin Kliger and Nikhil Rajpal were given access to CFPB's HR, procurement, and financial infrastructure. The DOGE workers were later granted access to all of the agency's systems on Friday, Bloomberg reported this week, including bank examination and enforcement records.
Later on Friday evening, Russell Vought—Trump's newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget—took over as the acting administrator for CFPB late Friday evening, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Soon after, DOGE staff began sending out email requests asking CFPB managers to give Kliger additional access to agency systems, including physical access control system, payroll processing systems, and the ability to edit the CFPB's website, sources tell WIRED.
Just before 10:30pm ET on Friday, sources say someone who appeared to have administrative privileges, accessed the agency server using Secure Shell (SSH), a protocol that allows remote control of a computer over a network. Bypassing the content management system, they [unpublished] the homepage file, causing a portion of the CFPB homepage to display a '404: Page not found', notice typical of a website that has been deleted or is otherwise missing. The remainder of the site was functional, including submission forms for industry whistleblowers and consumer complaints.
Around 11pm on Friday, the CFPB's X account disappeared and shortly after, according to a CFPB staffer, DOGE left the building.
CFPB sources who spoke to WIRED described being blindsided by the DOGE staffers. "They said they would follow protocol but repeatedly did not," one says, noting that the level of access these staffers have could allow them to lock others out of the building, take down the website, and 'obstruct the bureau's ability to carry out its mandate.'
One source at CFPB on Friday says they saw two young DOGE staffers wandering through the halls of the building trying to open doors.
'DOGE pulled a Darth Vader in cloud city where they came in promising to respect our rules and ask for read access and then tonight [Friday] at 6 they took a heel turn and demanded website access,' another CFPB source told WIRED at the time.
In a pair of emails sent Saturday and Monday, Vought effectively ordered all work at the agency to stop, freezing various enforcement efforts and work on regulations that would affect payment programs run by Big Tech companies.
The CFPB has long been a target of both Elon Musk and conservatives more broadly; the Project 2025 chapter on financial regulatory agencies describes it as 'a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency' and calls to have it abolished. Musk wrote 'RIP CFPB' with a gravestone emoji in an X post Friday afternoon. Last November, he posted 'Delete CFPB.' There are around 1,700 employees in total at the agency.
The CFPB was established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that imposed significant regulatory reform in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Its remit is to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive financial practices, and the agency claims to be responsible for $19.7 billion in consumer relief since its inception, as well as $5 billion in civil penalties.
Some of those wins have come against payment processors including Block, which was ordered to pay a total of $175 million in penalties last month for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect users of its Cash App from fraud. CFPB also has an active lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo for similar alleged failures on their shared payment app Zelle. Elon Musk will soon be in the peer-to-peer payments business as well, after X entered a partnership with Visa in late January.