Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined 40 Democratic Senators in a letter to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Acting Director Russell Vought outlining more than 80 congressionally mandated functions of the CFPB and pressing for answers on how the agency would be able to protect hardworking Americans from scams and fraud after firing almost the entire staff.
Senator Cortez Masto has been a longstanding champion for the CFPB and has consistently fought to protect Nevadans from fraud. Last year, she called out the Navy Federal Credit Union for its racial disparities in mortgage lending. Following a push from Cortez Masto, the CFPB created new consumer protections for homeowners who apply for Property Assessed Clean Energy loans to help them make energy-efficient upgrades to their homes. She has also introduced legislation to incentivize whistleblowers to report consumer fraud to the CFPB.
“Last week, you tried to fire nearly all of the agency’s remaining 1,700 employees—the staff responsible for fulfilling the CFPB’s mission and statutory requirements to prevent Americans from getting scammed by big banks and giant corporations,” wrote the senators. “Your hasty and unjustified mass firings are an illegal shutdown of the CFPB that will leave it unable to conduct agency actions that are required by law.”
“You directed the gutting of entire divisions—including departments created by Congress to protect servicemembers and older Americans—attempting to leave a shell of only 200 employees to supervise and examine large financial institutions across the country, respond to millions of consumer complaints, answer the phone for hundreds of thousands of people seeking help, monitor emergency financial risks, and run all of the agency’s other operations,” they continued.
The Senators laid out in detail the impact the mass layoffs would have on specific functions of the CFPB––including firing all but one employee helping victims of scams in the offices focused on our nation’s two million servicemembers and tens of millions of older Americans.
“We request that you provide—by April 30, 2025—a detailed accounting of each of the more than 80 statutory obligations of the CFPB, the number of employees assigned to each of those functions as of December 2024, the number of employees who would be assigned to each function if your rushed reduction in force were to go into effect, the immediate impact of such a reduction on the agency’s ability to perform each function consistent with federal law and federal court orders, and copies of any individualized or particularized analysis of those planned reductions on the agency’s work,” they concluded.
The full text of the letter can be found here.
Senator Cortez Masto has pushed multiple Departments under the Trump Administration for detailed, public information regarding the impacts of President Trump’s federal funding freeze, hiring freeze, and terminations on Nevada – including to the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, General Services Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services.
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