Judge orders CFPB to reinstate fired employees, preserve records and get back to work

cnbc.com:

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, to halt its campaign to dismantle the agency.

In a filing, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sided with the CFPB employee union that sued acting director Russell Vought last month to prevent him from laying off nearly all the regulator's staff. Operatives from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have also been involved in efforts to fire employees.

«Defendants shall not terminate any CFPB employee, except for cause related to the individual employee's performance or conduct; and defendants shall not issue any notice of reduction-in-force to any CFPB employee,» Berman said.

The order is the latest example in which a federal judge has pushed back against moves by the Trump administration to lay off federal employees and hobble disfavored agencies. It breathes new life into the only federal agency tasked specifically with consumer protection of nonbank financial players, but one that the industry has accused of operating outside its authority under former director Rohit Chopra.

Berman ordered Vought to reinstate all probationary and term employees fired after Vought took over at the CFPB, said that he shouldn't «delete, destroy, remove, or impair agency data,» and struck down Vought's February stop-work order.

«To ensure that employees can perform their statutorily mandated functions, the defendants must provide them with either fully-equipped office space, or permission to work remotely» Berman wrote.

In the sweeping document, Berman also said that the CFPB needed to ensure its consumer complaint portal worked and it responded to those complaints; told the CFPB to reverse contract terminations