The seal of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The White House is moving to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by the start of next year, seizing on the government shutdown in an attempt to accomplish a conservative goal of shuttering the federal watchdog.
White House Budget Director Russell Vought said in a podcast interview on Wednesday he intended to close the agency within the next three months, a move that could spark a legal battle given the legislative branch's jurisdiction over the CFPB.
"We don't have anyone working there except our Republican appointees and a few careers that are doing statutory responsibilities while we close down the agency," Vought said on The Charlie Kirk Show," a conservative podcast. He added it had the "DNA of Elizabeth Warren," the Democratic senator who was the agency's chief architect.
The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.
The embattled agency has long been a target for Republicans seeking to scale back what they view as government overreach. Since the start of the year, the Trump administration has decimated the CFPB with sweeping layoffs that have generated court challenges. Currently, Vought serves as the CFPB's acting director. Other career officials have long left and about 200 employees remain at the agency. Around 1,400 CFPB employees were fired this year.
Vought has dismissed scores of enforcement actions against large banks, credit reporting firms, and more. One dropped case involved a CFPB lawsuit against Capital One $COF that alleged deceptive practices that fooled customers out of hefty interest payments on savings accounts.
The Trump administration has tried dramatically downsizing the federal workforce with the shutdown entering its third week. In the same interview, Vought said he planned to fire around 10,000 civil servants while Congress negotiates a settlement on government funding.
However, a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily pause mass firings for two weeks. Federal Judge Susan Ilston of the U.S. District Court of Northern California sided with government worker unions which argued the layoffs as instituted by the Trump administration were illegal.
In a rebuke, Ilston said that the White House had "taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that that all bets are off, that the laws don't apply to them anymore."
