Recently deleted content from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s website is prompting some employees to ask: Is this another sign of the end?

The CFPB removed around 1,700 website pages spanning press releases, consumer advisories, speeches, testimony and op-eds dating before February 2025 — when Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought took over the bureau — from its website on Tuesday.

“I think that it’s in service of this message they’re trying to send: ‘Oh no, we’re not shutting the agency down, we’re just paring it down,’” said a CFPB employee who works on the website. “But the question is, is that just another step in them trying to shut it down entirely? Which I think it is.”

The agency also removed non-English language resources from the website on Thursday afternoon, in compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order in March of last year designating English as the official language of the U.S.

Website staff began work on the language changes in mid-May, according to the current employee. Links in the header of the CFPB website that directed users to foreign language translations were removed in March.

The “newsroom” search page now includes a note to users that content predating February 2025 was removed on Tuesday.

“It seems like a step to hide the agency’s accomplishments and the good it has done for everyday consumers,” another current employee said.

The removal of public statements will reduce website traffic through Google search results, because Google will lower the CFPB site’s relevance on certain topics, the employee who works on the website said. However, those web pages are still accessible through Internet Archive sites.

“If it was out of date, if it was inaccurate, there are ways for us to fix that. For it to disappear entirely — that goes against the whole idea of our work being the property of the American public,” the first employee said.

The content removals on Tuesday effectively eliminated consumer advisories, which warn Americans about predatory industry practices, from the site. Examples of deleted pages include a “know your rights” advisory related to medical debt collection and an advisory on hidden fees and complex terms on solar energy loans, according to screenshots on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The CFPB had not published any new advisories since Vought took the helm of the agency and issued stop-work orders.

It is unclear who ordered the removal of content or why. The lack of clarity initially raised questions for website staff about how to fulfill the directive. Alternatives to archiving the web pages included redirecting links to active web pages, creating a landing page announcing the content had been removed and coding a banner that indicated the content on the page was out of date.

The CFPB was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to supervise banks, enforce antifraud laws and field consumer complaints against private companies.

Work at the bureau slowed and even came to a standstill in some divisions last year, despite a federal judge’s preliminary injunction in March 2025 prohibiting Vought’s stop-work orders and reductions in force. More than 30% of the CFPB’s staff authorized for the 2025 fiscal year have departed the agency.

The court injunction hasn’t stopped Vought from trying to shrink the agency further.

CFPB leadership wants to reduce the current staff of 1,174 people to 556, with some of the largest cuts to the supervision and enforcement divisions, according to a court document filed by the CFPB in March. The only division that would be spared from staff cuts is the legal division, which defends the CFPB in court from challenges to its rulemaking, supervisory and enforcement actions.

Vought’s filing in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit requested that the court modify the preliminary injunction to allow reductions in force. The court has not ruled on the CFPB’s request.

The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The CFPB homepage went down on Wednesday afternoon due to an unrelated error.