Court OKs Trump’s Plan To Dismantle ‘Untouchable’ Federal Agency
A district court handed the Trump administration another victory on Friday, overturning an injunction that had previously blocked its effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
On February 1, President Trump dismissed CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, a Biden appointee. Acting Director Russell Vought subsequently ordered staff to cease all operations and close the agency’s headquarters. The move prompted a lawsuit from the National Treasury Employees Union, representing most CFPB employees, along with other plaintiffs.
In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a preliminary injunction halting the Trump administration’s actions, the Daily Wire reported.
“After briefly narrowing the scope of Jackson’s injunction, the DC Circuit panel reinstated the order shortly after the CFPB attempted a drastic reduction-in-force plan meant to slash the majority of the agency’s headcount,” Bloomberg News reported. “Lawyers for the Trump administration argued Jackson’s injunction was an overly broad encroachment on a federal agency’s efforts to downsize in accordance with the president’s policy directives.”
But on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated Judge Jackson’s preliminary injunction.
Created in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded by the Federal Reserve and has operated outside congressional oversight, with its budget not subject to approval by lawmakers — a distinction unique among federal agencies.
In 2015, Investor’s Business Daily accused the CFPB of “diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party” and planning to “create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund for its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions.”
In October 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stated that the CFPB’s “perpetual insulation from Congress’ appropriations power, including the express exemption from congressional review of its funding, renders the Bureau ‘no longer dependent, and as a result, no longer accountable’ to the Congress and ultimately, to the people.”