On April 28, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of 40 democratic senators, sent a letter to CFPB Acting Director, Russell Vought, expressing their concerns about Vought’s attempt to terminate nearly all of the Bureau’s 1,700 employees and reduce its workforce to about 200 employees (covered by InfoBytes here). The letter argued Vought’s actions threatened the CFPB’s ability to fulfill its statutory obligations, such as addressing millions of consumer complaints, supervising large financial institutions, and protecting servicemembers and older Americans. The senators directed Vought to provide a detailed accounting of the impact of these staff reductions on the Bureau’s ability to perform its functions by May 7.
According to the letter, the CFPB received more than 2.7 million complaints in 2024; however, court filings reflected Vought’s efforts to reduce the staff responsible for handling these complaints from 135 to 16 employees. Likewise, the office assisting servicemembers, which handled nearly 84,600 complaints in 2023, is intended to be reduced to a single employee while staff supervising more than 180 banks and nonbank lenders would be cut from 487 to 50 employees. The letter also denounced Vought’s efforts to dismantle the Bureau’s research office and eliminate its data office.
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