Diminished But Still Alive: Inside Russ Vought’s CFPB

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was slowly stirring back to life this year. The agency had started issuing a flurry of new rules, and staff were beginning examinations of financial institutions again and moving ahead on their enforcement casework.

Then hundreds of employees across the country received notices in late June signed by Acting Director Russell Vought: Move to Washington, D.C., by September, or lose your job. They have until July 21 to decide.

“You can’t give somebody two months to sell their house and move 2,000 miles,” one CFPB financial auditor based in the San Francisco Bay Area said.

“I knew right then, there’s no way I could do it. So this is them firing me,” they added, requesting anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

More than a year after the Trump administration attempted to shutter the agency, the CFPB remains mired in endless lawsuits over mass layoffs and agency funding. Still, 1,174 people were on payroll as of March.

NOTUS spoke with current and former employees, and reviewed staff testimonies given to the agency’s union. These workers recounted an agency barely functioning and a workforce in constant fear of dismissal. Some haven’t been assigned work since President Donald Trump returned to office last January. Many see the return-to-office mandate as the latest attempt to shut down the bureau.

“This illegal forced relocation is another attempt in Vought’s yearslong crusade to drive workers out of public service and close the CFPB,” Cat Farman, the CFPB union president, said in a statement to NOTUS.

The union declined to answer questions about how it will respond to the return-to-office orders, including whether it will challenge them in court.

The CFPB financial auditor — whose job is to ensure banks, lenders and debt collectors are following federal consumer finance laws — is waiting to see whether they will be given an exemption for a disability. The auditor said they suffered severe burns in a fire when they were a child and are under doctor’s orders to avoid walking more than a quarter mile each day, and they must keep their foot propped up when sitting, or they risk requiring amputation. The auditor, who is over the age of 60, also cares for their adult son, who has a serious mental illness, with their spouse.

Moving to Washington would result in an automatic $24,000-a-year pay cut because it’s a lower-cost-of-living area and would require them to sign a new lease while still paying their family’s expenses in California, the auditor said.

But retiring comes with its own costs. The auditor said leaving the workforce now would mean they’d receive $2,000 less per month in Social Security and pension benefits than they planned.

“They’re screwing me all up there,” they said.

It’s unclear how many employees have already received exemptions or what factored into the decision to issue them. The CFPB did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.

Roughly 450 employees living around the country received return-to-office notices in recent weeks, including many working in roles designed to be outside Washington, D.C. If they choose to relocate, most must begin in-person work by September 6.

About 650 CFPB employees already live within a 50-mile radius of the city and are expected back in the office starting July 13. The agency cited Trump’s January executive order mandating in-person work for the federal workforce, as well as the president’s orders to eliminate government waste and cut taxpayer costs in its notices to workers.

Employees must work from the office at least two days a week. Several staff members told NOTUS they’re under the impression there won’t be enough desks for all the employees who will soon be required to work in the office. They added that staff had been paired up with colleagues and scheduled to come in on different days.

“So you’re going to move across the country, uproot your life, and then you’ll only be in the office about 50% of the time?” an employee in the agency’s supervision division said.

Many employees are skeptical about quickly relocating for jobs that agency leaders have repeatedly attempted to eliminate. They are weighing the risk of selling their homes, sinking cash into moving expenses and arranging costly child or elder care to comply with the order, according to interviews with current employees and written testimonies collected by the employees’ union and shared with NOTUS.

“It’s ridiculous, it’s inhumane, it’s unprofessional, it is beyond what any reasonable person I think would consider normal or called for,” said Chuck Werner, an information technology worker at the CFPB. “The harm being done is that no one’s being asked to do their job for the most part. Well, what are they all of a sudden planning to ask people to do their job?”

Werner, who is based in Pittsburgh, said he has a medical condition that makes walking difficult, increasing the risk he develops sores that lead to infections. He’s been hospitalized multiple times and anxious that he’ll get injured.

Relocating would mean leaving his relatives hundreds of miles away and risking his mental and physical health, he said.

Within two days of receiving Vought’s notice, Werner received an email from Chris Chilbert, the CFPB’s chief information officer, to the tech team.

“I know that this is incredibly upsetting and disruptive, and there is nothing I can write or say that will change that,” Chilbert wrote in the email, which was reviewed by NOTUS. “Exemption decisions were made by the acting director and are final.”

Werner said he will defer his decision to relocate until he receives guidance from the union. He plans to file for an exemption for his medical condition, but he refuses to simply “give up” and relocate.

“I want to be a part of setting a precedent of the protections of federal workers against political influence,” Werner said. “We cannot go back to the systems of the past where every political appointee or every government hire was just someone’s retinue, his patronage council.”

Current CFPB employees say that agency leadership has assigned them questionable projects that diminish the quality and potential impact of the bureau’s work.

The California-based auditor said they have received zero assignments since Trump took office last year. They would typically have conducted eight or nine exams over the course of those 17 months, they said.

“We’re the police force of the financial world,” they said. “Imagine if a city just fired all their police officers, and the criminals were able to do whatever they wanted to do, and nobody stopped them.”

The supervision department has been among the hardest hit at the CFPB. The department has 173 fewer employees than were authorized for the 2025 fiscal year, a March court filing by the CFPB shows.

Examiners once visited financial institutions around the country to listen in on their customer service calls, access their computer systems and review their records to ensure compliance with federal consumer finance laws.

Examinations, which started up again around late spring, last around three weeks and involve two to three examiners, supervision employees said. Before the pandemic, bank examinations took eight weeks and involved as many as 10 examiners.

Current agency leaders only allow examiners to work within a narrow scope of issues when reviewing banks, the supervision employee said.

“We are actually conducting exams, but they are kind of laughable,” the employee said. “We are severely limited in time, severely limited in resources, although we have enough of both. And the reason that there’s such a shortage is because they don’t want us to go deeper. They don’t want us to actually examine and conduct legal analysis into the full work that we are used to doing, that we’re charged and mandated to do.”

The agency has issued 21 rules so far this year, from standardizing data practices to a rule that would tighten criteria for discrimination claims in credit lending in line with Trump’s executive orders on merit-based opportunity.

The enforcement division also remains active, though the majority of its cases have been closed since Trump returned to office. CFPB attorneys are quietly working on at least three cases, including against the consumer credit reporting company Experian, the debt-relief company Strategic Financial Solutions and the debt collector United Debt Holdings.

Vought has sought to further shrink the enforcement division, which investigates and litigates violations of consumer financial laws.

In March, Vought requested a modification to an appeals court’s previous order to allow reductions in force, or RIFs, of more than half the bureau’s remaining employees, including massive cuts to the supervision and enforcement divisions. The court denied Vought’s request in June.

The CFPB reported 549 fewer employees in the March filing than were authorized for the 2025 fiscal year. Many have opted to retire or left for other job opportunities as the bureau’s future became uncertain.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amy Berman Jackson first issued an injunction halting layoffs in March 2025, though the agency remains mired in a legal battle over the future of its workforce.

CFPB employees are now placing their hopes in Jackson siding with them in a potential legal challenge to the return-to-office notices.

In any case, the supervision employee said they’re willing to move across the country to keep the agency alive.

“I want to help keep the lights on, and so if it comes down to it, then yes, I would ultimately move,” the employee said. “We’re really losing a lot of people who have, you know, institutional knowledge, have a certain level of expertise and also have been here for the reasons that the bureau was intentionally stood up, so I want to be part of stopping that hemorrhaging.”