In this op-ed, five former employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reflect on being fired from the agency as part of massive reductions across the federal workforce.
Authors’ note: Our views are our own. We are not speaking on behalf of the CFPB. Teen Vogue reached out to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for comment.
We were in elementary school in 2010 when Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We were high schoolers the first time Donald Trump was elected president. Until two weeks ago, we were federal employees at the CFPB.
The CFPB is highly politicized by its opponents, but its mission is simple and nonpartisan: to stand up to bullies in the financial marketplace. We worked at the only federal agency that views consumers (everyday, working people) as the center of our economy.
We act on consumer complaints to counter deception and fraud in our financial system, and secure real results for consumers within weeks. We study financial markets to understand existing risks to consumers and to prevent new ones. We contribute to rigorous research that breaks down how our economy actually operates, revealing evidence-backed disparities in access to student loans, housing, and credit cards, among other market areas. As young professionals at the beginning of careers in public service, each day at work is a chance to contribute to a mission in which we can take pride.
That is, until we couldn’t anymore. We were locked out of our office on February 9. We were told to cease all work tasks. Our colleagues were fired, some potentially illegally, with form emails that reduced them to [EmployeeFirstName] [EmployeeLastName]. On February 13, we were fired too, along with more civil servants from across the federal government. At least our termination letters had our names on them.
At the start of this month, the world was introduced to the DOGE bros, fellow twenty-somethings who, without any prior federal experience, have been directed to dismantle at least parts of our federal bureaucracy (again, potentially illegally) through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. We are all young people early in our careers. Even our employers share a similar directive, at least on paper: holding powerful entities accountable for returning money to the American people. Though mainly coincidental, these similarities emphasize the fundamental differences in who we are and our work.
We believe the CFPB should exist, with all its human power and resources, to ensure the agency can send another $21 billion back to consumers, while they seem to believe that the CFPB is a wasteful, bloated agency. President Trump has instructed DOGE to slash spending on programs that “have no value.” To them, that includes us. Along with our former colleagues, we shoulder the grief of the impact this could have on the consumers our agency has spent years fighting for.
The nature of our work seems opposite to that of the young men carrying out the DOGE cuts. Government work can be notoriously slow and laborious — and that can be frustrating. But the CFPB’s lengthy, empirically-driven rulemaking process, for example, prioritizes public feedback at all stages, depending on subject matter expertise and statistical analyses. In other words, we have guardrails in place that do take time, but ultimately help us get the best results for consumers.
Our processes stand in stark contrast to the sloppy work of our peers in DOGE. Their slash-and-burn tactics had them reportedly holed up in a boarded-up conference room in the basement of our office, deciding the best way to seemingly dismantle our agency. The DOGE crusade creates the conditions for a single partisan project to become endemic. There’s been some debate as to whether CFPB’s new leaders plan to dismantle the agency completely, or to diminish its capacity. Our former colleagues argue in a new court filing, based on leaders’ own words, that eliminating the CFPB does seem to be the goal. Even if the CFPB isn’t totally eliminated, leaving a husk of our former agency reduces it so far that it’s essentially dismantled. According to the same court filing, one employee heard a CFPB Senior Executive saying he hopes to reduce the agency to a “room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone in it.”
Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, was named the acting director of the CFPB, while the Senate held hearings for Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Jonathan McKernan. McKernan has promised to keep CFPB alive, but said he plans to shrink it in the name of efficiency. If DOGE actually cares about efficiency, they’d take notice that for every $1 spent on the CFPB, it has returned an estimated $2.80 to consumers, according to government data.
Drastically reducing or dismantling the CFPB cannot erase the conditions that led to its creation. Disasters like the 2008 Great Recession, injustices like allowing credit access to be determined by race and gender — these are the very things we worked every day to avoid. Though other agencies may have similar mandates, the CFPB alone gives everyday, working people a voice in how they’re treated in the consumer financial marketplace. Something they did not have in 2008. What happens if the only agency holding Wall Street accountable to consumers is eliminated, or at least radically weakened?
We, the twenty-somethings fighting for the CFPB, didn’t want to stop working. We came to public service armed with the belief that there are things that matter more than profit. Our burgeoning careers, though cut short, have already taught us that efficiency is not always the highest public good. The financial stability and soundness of the American people cannot be reduced to a line item in a budget that needs minimizing. The federal government is decidedly not corporate America. Nor, we argue, should it be.
However, even as we want to get back to work, we’re concerned by new decisions made by CFPB leadership. We were told that they intend to comply with recent executive orders, including a discriminatory directive targeting transgender and nonbinary colleagues and an order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion offices from federal workplaces. Many of these executive orders are at odds with existing laws. Even so, agency-level compliance is already taking effect. As we join our colleagues at rallies chanting, “Let us work,” this promised compliance casts a shadow over the work we’re fighting to return to.
Continuing a career in federal service means contending with the legacy this Trump administration has already created for the executive branch and its workforce: that the federal workforce is disposable and, for those who get to stay, loyalty is required. Compliance with the directives of Trump’s Oval Office assumes a sense of normalcy, that the administration (including DOGE and its billionaire leader) are working in good faith and with reverence to our laws. It has become abundantly clear that they are not.
We will keep fighting for our jobs, which we should still have. We will keep asking self-interested plutocrats for the ability to return to work because we know that the CFPB should exist. However, we must consider whether the remnants of the CFPB that survives this Trump administration can provide the protection consumers need. We know what can happen without these guardrails; the danger of going back is just too high.
