In today’s news and commentary, the Trump administration proposes to reduce the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to a third of its former size, and the Ninth Circuit holds that an arbitrator finding one employee’s arbitration agreement invalid does not invalidate the identical agreements of other employees.
Bloomberg reports that the Trump administration has settled on a strategy of only partially dismantling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). Last week, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and acting director of the CFPB, submitted a plan to the DC Circuit that would reduce the agency to about a third of its former size. Under Biden, the CFPB had about 1,500 staff. The Trump administration initially tried to fire as many as 90% of those employees, but a federal judge enjoined the mass firings. Since then — with the injunction still in effect — the agency has been trimmed down to about 1,200 staff. Under Vought’s new proposal, which he hopes will induce the court to lift the injunction, that number would decline to about 550. The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) points out that those cuts will lead to significant consumer harm: “Vought’s insistence that CFPB can meet its statutory obligations with only one-third of the staff is laughable, and an insult to the intelligence of the judges. Everyone knows Vought doesn’t want CFPB to exist at all.” Still, some see the move as a kind of admission of defeat by the...
A federal judge on Monday largely blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out civil immigration arrests at several Manhattan immigration courthouses, after government lawyer...