The Trump-era backlash against DEI efforts has extended to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Any and all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility ('DEIA') activities will cease immediately within the CFPB," the bureau’s acting director, Russ Vought, wrote Wednesday in a memo seen by Banking Dive.  

“Any employee who attempts to continue race-based and other DEIA-based activities at the CFPB may be referred for investigation for violation of civil rights laws," Vought wrote. "Refusal to faithfully implement this directive shall be considered gross insubordination."

Termination was not specifically mentioned as a consequence for employees seen as failing to follow the directive, but this wouldn’t mark the first time the CFPB’s current management has deemed noncompliance as “insubordination.”

“Implementation of past priorities is to cease immediately,” Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer wrote to enforcement division employees in February, after Vought issued a stop-work order. “Failure to abide by these instructions constitutes insubordination and we will take appropriate personnel action.”

Among personal details now forbidden at the agency: email signature blocks could no longer include preferred pronoun, Vought said Wednesday.

On a larger scale, the CFPB has two offices mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that could be seen, by the nature of their work, as violating Wednesday’s directive: the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, and the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity.

Neither office was mentioned specifically in Vought’s memo Wednesday. The website for the CFPB’s OMWI was still active as of Thursday morning. However, a job posting seeking a director for that office was taken down, Bloomberg Law reported Wednesday.

"No staff, budget, training, facilities or technologies shall be dedicated to DEIA," Vought wrote in Wednesday’s memo. "CFPB personnel shall stop any actions that were undertaken pursuant to now-revoked Executive Orders on DEIA issues by the Biden Administration."

The memo prohibits the CFPB from “gathering and analysis of data relating to DEIA, and publishing reports” and de-emphasizes “consideration of DEIA” in decision-making. It also flags employee affinity groups as entities to be affected by the directive.

The CFPB is hardly the first banking regulator to disengage from Biden-era DEI initiatives. The Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Commodity Futures Trading Commission no longer list offices for minority and women inclusion on the “organization” section of their websites. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does but only lists leadership of the office. The Securities and Exchange Commission, by contrast, still devotes a webpage to it.

Many of the nation’s largest banks, too, have scrubbed references to DEI efforts from annual reports over the past month.

The question of whether the CFPB is performing statutorily mandated work – and how much – has been an ongoing thread in a court case between the bureau and the National Treasury Employees Union.

“It has come to my attention … that some employees have not been performing statutorily required work,” Paoletta wrote March 2 in a note to CFPB employees. “Let me be clear: Employees should be performing work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so.”

However, Cassandra Huggins, the CFPB’s principal deputy assistant director of supervision policy, wrote the following day that the bureau’s supervisory employees “requested and received clarification that [Paoletta’s] message was not intended to authorize the reinstatement of supervision/examination activity, even though the Bureau is required by law to carry out these activities.”

“It has been communicated to me that Supervision staff should continue to operate on administrative leave as directed by the Acting Director unless you have received express permission to work on a task,” Huggins wrote March 3.

A day later, Paoletta wrote Huggins with “significant concerns” that her message “directly contradicts” his.

“I directed ALL CFPB staff to perform all work required by law and that they did not need to seek prior approval to do so,” Paoletta wrote March 4. “Your actions severely undermine the Agency leadership’s ability to supervise the agency staff and to ensure that statutorily required duties are being performed.”

The exchange between Paoletta and Huggins was submitted as evidence in the NTEU case. But the miscommunication spurred Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is hearing the case, to ask Brad Rosenberg, a Justice Department special counsel representing the defense: "Does the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau know what the statutorily required duties are?"

"When individuals have identified statutory duties, they have been approved by Mr. Paoletta," Rosenberg said, according to American Banker.

"So it's up to the employees to identify them, not up to the director to identify them down?" Berman Jackson asked.

"Under the current bureau, that's how it's been operating," Rosenberg said.