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Trump cannot clearly “fire nearly all CFPB staff” as a matter of settled law, and the D.C. Circuit itself is now wrestling with how far courts may go in policing Trump‑era efforts to purge roughly 90% of the Bureau’s workforce.
What the current appeals court is doing
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A D.C. Circuit panel previously allowed the administration to move ahead with a massive reduction‑in‑force, vacating Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s injunction and letting CFPB leadership proceed with plans to terminate more than 1,400 employees, subject only to a “particularized assessment” that they were unnecessary to statutory functions.
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That same mass‑layoff plan would have left only about 200 employees at CFPB, effectively hollowing out the agency without formally abolishing it, something even the panel conceded the president has no power to do unilaterally because Congress created the Bureau by statute.
Why the authority is uncertain
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The legal fight is not about Trump’s power to remove the CFPB Director (already recognized in Seila Law‑style precedents), but about whether civil‑service and administrative‑law constraints prevent using RIFs and terminations to de facto shut the agency down.
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Judge Pillard’s dissent underscores the uncertainty: she accepts that the president has broad authority to run CFPB, but argues that deliberately reducing it to a shell so that “there were no Bureau at all” exceeds presidential discretion and violates separation‑of‑powers limits, because only Congress can repeal the statute that created CFPB.
Interaction with broader federal‑workforce cases
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In a separate but related context, the Supreme Court in Trump v. AFGE allowed large‑scale firing of federal employees, signaling a more expansive view of presidential control over the civil service, while still acknowledging that Congress sets up agencies and defines their functions by law.
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The D.C. Circuit is now trying to reconcile that broad firing authority with the specific statutory mandate Congress gave CFPB and with APA‑style review, which is why judges are probing whether lower courts overstepped by blocking acting CFPB chief Russell Vought from cutting as much as 90% of staff.
Practical bottom line right now
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For the moment, injunctions and ongoing litigation have repeatedly paused or constrained the most aggressive versions of the CFPB staff purge; at various points courts have barred mass firings, required individualized “particularized assessments,” or reinstated employees with back pay.
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Until the D.C. Circuit sitting en banc (and potentially the Supreme Court) squarely answers whether using RIFs to reduce CFPB to a token staff violates separation of powers or civil‑service protections, the answer to “Can Trump fire nearly all CFPB staff?” remains legally contested—hence the framing that the appeals court “isn’t sure.”
Are you mainly interested in the separation‑of‑powers angle (Congress’s ability to “entrench” CFPB) or in the practical civil‑service protections available to individual CFPB employees in this litigation?
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