Court suspends mass firings at CFPB

Last week, we noted plans for a mass firing of around 1,500 CFPB employees in a sudden shrinking of the agency's activity. Today, we see that ABC News reported on Friday afternoon, that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered an immediate halt to the planned firings of nearly 1,500 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is ordering the Trump administration to hand over communications and make top officials available for testimony to determine whether they deliberately violated one of her court orders.

District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told attorneys for the government she was "deeply concerned" about the apparently rushed efforts to implement a Reduction In Force, or RIF, of approximately 1483 employees at the CFPB which was set to take effect at 6 pm Friday evening.

Jackson said the moves by CFPB leadership, in apparent coordination with a staffer from Elon Musk's DOGE operation, may be in direct violation of a preliminary injunction she had put in place -- which the D.C. Circuit upheld in part. That injunction required terminations at the agency to be carried out only after "particularized assessments" of individual employees' performance.