DC District Court Issues Preliminary Injunction Stopping CFPB Acting Leadership from “Deleting” the CFPB

Judge Amy Berman Jackson filed an opinion today, March 28, 2025, granting the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction in the NTEU et al. v. Vought, one of the lawsuits that challenges the current Acting Director’s actions at the CFPB, including the stop-work order. The plaintiffs' motion for the preliminary injunction sought to prevent the acting leadership of the CFPB from taking certain steps at the CFPB, including to terminate or suspend the CFPB's operations and to life the stop work order, while the case is pending.

Judge Jackson stated in the opinion, after a long discussion of the facts and law, that “the Court cannot look away or the CFPB will be dissolved and dismantled completely in approximately thirty days, well before this lawsuit has come to its conclusion. For all of the reasons set forth above, the Court will GRANT plaintiffs’ motion and issue a preliminary injunction that maintains the agency’s existence until this case has been resolved on the merits, reinstating and preserving the agency’s contracts, work force, data, and operational capacity, and protecting and facilitating the employees’ ability to perform statutorily required activities.”

The court’s order states that the CFPB must take certain actions to preserve the agency, which include:

•   maintain and not delete, destroy, remove, or impair any data;
•   reinstate all probationary and term employees terminated between February 10, 2025 and the date of the order;
•   not terminate any CFPB employee, except for cause related to the individual employee’s performance or conduct;
•   must not issue any reduction-in-force notice to any CFPB employee.
•   not enforce the February 10, 2025 stop-work order or require employees to take administrative leave;
•   ensure that employees can perform their statutorily mandated functions;
•   must ensure that in accordance with 12 U.S.C. §5492(b)(3), the CFPB Office of Consumer Response continues to maintain a single, toll-free telephone number, a website, and a database for the centralized collection of consumer complaints
•   rescind all notices of contract termination issued on or after February 11, 2025, and they may not reinitiate the wholesale cancellation of contracts.

Whatever you believe about the merits (or lack thereof) of the acting leadership’s actions, this is big news for those entities subject to the CFPB’s jurisdiction.

We will be doing a longer blog post on this soon.  In the meantime, please email me at rich@garrishorn.com if you’d like to discuss.