A room with ‘5 men and a phone in it’: Lawsuit filing details DOGE’s plans to dismantle the CFPB
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Before a last-minute intervention by a federal judge, Trump administration officials were planning to strip apart the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until there was nothing left of the agency but a room with “five men and a phone in it,” according to current and former employees.
Their written testimony was contained in documents submitted Thursday as part of a lawsuit aimed at halting mass firings at the besieged bureau. They offer new step-by-step details of how insiders say the administration planned to decimate the regulator charged with policing the way large banks, mortgage lenders, and other financial services companies treat customers.
They also describe how key functions the agency is required to carry out under federal law, such as operating a consumer complaint portal, have largely ceased to function thanks to the cancellation of virtually all its outside contracts and the stop-work order issued by acting director Russell Vought.
Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia temporarily blocked Trump officials from laying off CFPB staff two weeks ago in response to a legal challenge by a union representing federal employees, which claimed the administration was planning to effectively eliminate the agency by terminating 95% of its originally 1,700-strong workforce, ending its leases, and canceling its outside contracts.
The Trump administration is seeking to lift her order and argued in a motion this week that it is only trying to “streamline” the CFPB rather than do away with it entirely, and that it has continued to keep its statutorily required functions operating.
But according to Thursday’s filings, the Trump team — with support from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — planned to leave in place a rump version of the CFPB that existed in name only.
Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez told employees that the agency was in “wind down mode,” according to twoof the declarations submitted by anonymous current employees. Senior executives explained to staff “the writing was on the wall” and allegedly “shared that the intention of the leadership was to fire everyone but the five positions required by the Dodd-Frank Act,” which established the CFPB.
“One Senior Executive said that CFPB will become a ‘room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone in it,’” an employee identified as Drew Doe testified.
Trump officials planned to fire staff in three phases, according to the filings, starting with recent hires who were on probation or term-limited. A DOGE team member named Jordan Winck allegedly ordered the CFPB staff to terminate another 1,200 of its workers by Feb. 14. Most of the remaining employees were to be cleared out 60 to 90 days later.
“The Bureau intended to comply and fire the vast majority of remaining employees on February 14th,” a CFPB staffer identified as Alex Doe writes. “The only reason it did not do so is because of this Court’s order temporarily prohibiting it from doing so.”
People attend a protest in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Feb. 10, at the CFPB headquarters in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
According to the declarations, Trump and DOGE officials quickly canceled about $200 million worth of the Bureau’s outstanding $227 million in contracts with outside vendors providing everything from expert legal testimony to cybersecurity. Some of the data that those vendors maintained may be lost permanently.
“I have been a contracting officer for many years, through multiple changes in administration,” wrote a contracting officer identified as Charlie Doe. “The events of the past few weeks are unlike anything I’ve ever seen at any agency during any change in administration (or at any other time). The instructions to contracting officers did not reflect a change in policy direction, but rather a wholesale termination of the contracts needed to keep the CFPB running.”
Separately, CFPB director of digital services Adam Scott wrote in a declaration that he was told Vought had personally made the decision to delete the CFPB’s homepage.
In the government’s court filing earlier this week, Martinez, the COO, denied claims that the bureau was effectively trying to empty its own coffers by transferring its cash back to the Federal Reserve. But an employee identified as Blake Doe contradicted him on Thursday, writing in a declaration that he had seen “email dated February 11, 2025, in which Mr. Martinez stated that Chief Financial Officer Jafnar Gueye was in communications with the Federal Reserve about how to return money to either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury.”
According to the filings, some key functions that the CFPB is required to maintain by law are now, at best, only partially functioning thanks to Vought’s stop-work order. Its consumer complaint portal is only able to automatically process certain submissions, and somewhere around 10,000 complaints may still be awaiting manual review, according to one declaration.
The CFPB’s student loan ombudsman post is also vacant, and its general ombudsman, who administration officials said would pick up the slack, has purportedly been ordered not to work.
A new hearing in the suit is scheduled for next week. On Friday, 203 Democratic members of Congress submitted an amicus brief in the case asking the court to stop the Trump administration from shutting down the CFPB “by fiat.”
Meanwhile, even as most of the CFPB’s work remains on pause, it has been dismissing many of its outstanding enforcement cases. After dropping five suits on Thursday, it dismissed yet another — this time against the credit rating agency TransUnion — on Friday afternoon.
Jordan Weissmann is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance.
