Good news. From The New York Times:
From The New York Times:
Trump Administration Scales Back Plan to Dismantle Consumer Protection Bureau
A new filing asks a federal court to allow the White House to dismiss much of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s remaining work force, but not close the bureau entirely.
The Trump administration is seeking a federal court’s approval to fire more than half of the remaining staff at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a step back from the White House’s prior attempts to eliminate at least 90 percent of the bureau’s staff and shutter the agency.
In a court filing late Tuesday, the agency said Russell T. Vought — its acting director and the architect of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal work force — “will not close the agency” but should be permitted to “right-size agency operations.”
A memo included in the filing documents the latest restructuring plan, which calls for preserving a total of 556 staff positions. At the end of January, the agency had around 1,200 employees, a 30 percent drop from the 1,750 workers it had shortly before President Trump began his second term.
The new plan would gut significant parts of the agency but keep it intact, after a series of court decisions that blocked efforts to carry out mass firings. Mr. Trump has made it a goal of his administration to close the bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the Great Recession to strengthen and enforce federal consumer protection laws. That cannot be done without congressional action.
The new plan was approved by Mr. Vought, the White House budget office director. He has also served as the consumer bureau’s acting director for more than a year, using a series of procedural moves to indefinitely extend his stay.
The proposed restructuring would slash the agency’s supervision department, which oversees the banks and other financial companies that hold trillions of dollars in mortgage, auto, credit card and student loan debt. That unit, once the bureau’s largest, would drop from more than 500 employees last year to just 77.
Other departments slated for steep cuts include the bureau’s enforcement division, which has extracted nearly $20 billion from companies in consumer refunds and debt cancellation. That unit — which has ended dozens of lawsuits and enforcement actions since Mr. Vought arrived, and initiated only one — would retain 50 workers, down from the 250 it had last year.
The consumer bureau has been a target of Republican ire for the entirety of its nearly 15-year existence. Mr. Vought said as recently as October that he believed he would be able to close the agency “within the next two, three months.”
But federal courts have intervened to prevent Mr. Vought from mass firings of employees, sometimes acting just hours before his termination orders could be carried out.
Tuesday’s filing was made to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held oral arguments in a pivotal case last month. The court has, for now, sustained a lower-court injunction barring Mr. Vought from conducting a mass firing, but the filing came as a request to reverse that position and allow the firings to proceed.
The law firm representing the plaintiffs in the litigation — the bureau’s staff union and a coalition of consumer advocacy groups — did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bureau’s latest restructuring plan.
A statement from the plaintiffs, included in the bureau’s filing, said they had been given only a few hours’ advance notice of the bureau’s plan and would respond after they had time to evaluate the proposal.
Mr. Vought halted nearly all of the bureau’s work immediately after he arrived, and its duties — even those required by law — went unperformed for most of last year. But in recent months, some operations have slowly begun to restart, especially in the bureau’s regulations division.
While Wall Street has long loathed the bureau for its aggressive enforcement tactics, the agency’s recent inertia is starting to pose problems for the financial industry. For example, financial companies have been waiting for the bureau to finalize regulations around small-dollar lending and so-called open banking rules for sharing consumer financial data.
In a sign of the Trump administration’s intended priorities for the bureau, the unit responsible for issuing those regulations is slated to retain 125 positions — more than almost any other department at the agency.
Stacy Cowley is a Times business reporter who writes about a broad array of topics related to consumer finance, including student debt, the banking industry and small business.
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