The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is scrambling to bring back staff to perform legally mandated tasks such as maintaining its consumer complaint database, according to emails submitted in litigation seeking to prevent the Trump administration from shuttering the agency.
The emails, filed late Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, show the CFPB began a push to bring back workers in its units handling consumer response, regulations, and other required activities just ahead of a March 3 hearing before Judge Amy Berman Jackson.
A series of emails from CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta and Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez starting last week sought to bring workers back from administrative leave to carry out tasks required by the Dodd-Frank Act.
“It has come to my attention, however, that some employees have not been performing statutorily required work,” Martinez said in a March 2 email on behalf of Paoletta. “Employees should be preforming work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so.”
Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought issued a broad stop-work order to CFPB employees on Feb. 10. That directive expanded an order from Vought two days earlier suspending all CFPB work except for legally mandated operations and activities expressly approved by the acting director or Paoletta.
Employee Questions
Paoletta and Martinez were inundated in recent days with emails from personnel in various CFPB units asking what constitutes legally mandated work, according to records filed with the court.
Paoletta authorized the return of most employees in the CFPB’s consumer response unit and allowed the research, markets, and regulations division to continue working on mandated reports, such as a review of credit card markets.
A limited number of staff from the CFPB’s civil rights office were authorized to work on their own mandated reports.
The biggest confusion came in the CFPB’s supervision division.
Cassandra Huggins, the CFPB’s principal deputy assistant director for supervision policy and operations, sent an email to her staff March 3 telling them not to work without authorization following an exchange with Martinez.
Paoletta followed that up with a Tuesday email to Huggins raising “significant concerns” about her staff communication.
Paoletta repeated Vought’s mandate to carry out work required by law, though he didn’t specify whether supervision mandated by Dodd-Frank should begin again. Instead, he instructed Huggins to put together a report describing all “pending examination actions, including their current status.”
Huggins responded that she didn’t leak her email, which was sent to the press during the March 3 hearing before Jackson.
“I did not intend to undermine the new administration’s ability to supervise agency staff—my only intention was to ensure that our staff did not act against the direction of the February 8 email from Acting Director Vought to cease all supervisory and examination activity,” she said in her Tuesday response.
Canceled Contracts
The trove of internal emails also included details of CFPB attempts to restart a small subset of the more than $100 million in contracts canceled under Vought.
“We’re taking a very narrow approach: if without the contract the Bureau can’t meet a statutory requirement then it will be considered for reactivation,” CFPB Chief Financial Officer Jafnar Gueye said in a March 3 email.
Early on in Vought’s tenure, the CFPB replaced its homepage with a 404 error page, although the information on the rest of the site has remained available.
CFPB attempts to get the homepage back up and running were denied, according to a Feb. 18 email from Chief Information Officer Christopher Chilbert.
“My understanding is that the decision to delete the homepage was made by Acting Director Vought, and it was not an error made by the members of the DOGE team,” Chilbert said, referring to a Department of Government Efficiency team detailed to the CFPB.
The case is NTEU v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, notice of filing 3/4/25.
