Ahead of a hearing set for Monday in federal district court in Washington, D.C., a dozen current and former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees released statements detailing the depth of cuts the Trump administration had planned at the agency.

In meetings between Feb. 18 and Feb. 25, “staff were told by Senior Executives that the CFPB would be eliminated except for the five statutorily mandated positions,” Drew Doe, a bureau employee using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, wrote Thursday in a statement submitted to the court. “One Senior Executive said that CFPB will become a ‘room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone in it.’”

Another employee, Alex Doe – also a pseudonym – said the plan from CFPB leadership and the Department of Government Efficiency included cutting the bureau’s workforce in three phases. The first, an elimination of probationary and term employees, was carried out last month. The second – a mass firing of roughly 1,200 employees in which whole offices, divisions and units would be dispatched altogether – would spare only the positions necessary to carry out the “closure of the agency,” Doe quoted CFPB Chief Operations Officer Adam Martinez as saying. Within 60 to 90 days, those positions, too, would be eliminated in Phase 3, Alex Doe said.

The judge in the Washington case, brought against the CFPB by the National Treasury Employees Union, on Feb. 14 ordered the bureau and its acting director, Russ Vought, not to terminate any agency employees until March 3 except for cause related to job performance or conduct.

Alex Doe said the bureau intended to carry out the second phase of its plan Feb. 14. “The only reason it did not … is because of this Court’s order temporarily prohibiting it from doing so,” Doe said.

Vought, in a motion filed with the court last Monday, asserted that if elimination of the CFPB were the goal, the White House would not have nominated Jonathan McKernan to lead it permanently. McKernan, a former board member at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., testified on Capitol Hill at his nomination hearing Thursday in front of the Senate Banking Committee.

Vought cited his own recent letter to the Federal Reserve, noting the CFPB’s “new leadership will run a substantially more streamlined and efficient bureau.”

“The predicate to [that] is that there will continue to be a CFPB,” Vought wrote.

In an email to CFPB staff Sunday, Martinez expressed concern that “some employees have not been performing statutorily required work.”

“Employees should be performing work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so,” Martinez wrote in the email, seen by Bloomberg Law.

Vought, in an email to staff Feb. 10, wrote: “Please do not perform any work tasks. If there are any urgent matters, please alert me through Mark Paoletta, Chief Legal Officer, to get approval in writing before performing any work task. Otherwise, employees should stand down from performing any work task.”

Martinez on Sunday also contributed to a filing in the NTEU case, identifying one statutory function of the CFPB – the escalated case management team in the consumer response unit – that is “working … as of February 27, 2025.”

Blake Doe, another CFPB employee, wrote in a court document Thursday, that Martinez, in a Feb. 13 meeting, characterized the CFPB as in “wind-down mode.”

In his filing Sunday, Martinez “now admits that all of the statements attributed to him — about plans to ‘“leav[e] a Bureau that could not actually perform any functions, or no Bureau at all,’” to transfer functions to other agencies, to ‘“carry out the closure of the agency,’” and to make plans for after the ‘“CFPB itself was no longer operating’” — are ‘“not inaccurate.’”

“The events of the past few weeks are unlike anything I've ever seen at any agency during any change in administration (or at any other time)," a fourth CFPB employee, Charlie Doe, said in a filing. "The instructions to contracting officers did not reflect a change in policy direction, but rather a wholesale termination of the contracts needed to keep the CFPB running."

In a second case against the CFPB, brought by the city of Baltimore, a judge extended a temporary restraining order, preventing the agency from sending money back to the Federal Reserve or Treasury Department. That order will stay in effect until March 14.