The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s workers’ union on Tuesday urged an appeals court to deny the bureau’s bid to override a district judge’s decision to again halt the bureau’s 1,500 layoffs.

The National Treasury Employees Union, in a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said evidence indicates no court-required assessment was conducted before the bureau sought to cut about 90% of its staff, and the layoffs could leave CFPB data “irreparably lost and the Consumer Response Division unable to function.”

The filing counters a motion the CFPB filed Friday, defending the method by which the bureau arrived at its job-cut total. A 200-person workforce was enough to allow the agency to fulfill its statutory obligations, “and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy,” attorneys for the bureau said.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia earlier Friday temporarily temporarily paused the CFPB’s plan to cut off nearly 1,500 employees’ access to bureau systems as part of a reduction in force Acting Director Russ Vought announced the previous day. 

Attorneys representing the CFPB argued the NTEU and Berman Jackson shouldn’t be allowed to “second-guess” the CFPB’s determination that the employees being cut are unnecessary to perform the bureau’s statutory duties.

The NTEU, in its Tuesday rebuttal, said Vought and CFPB leadership last week “took another shot at doing what the district court had stopped them from doing only a few weeks ago: shuttering the CFPB.”

Earlier this month, the appeals court said the CFPB could issue RIF notices only after employees have been “determined, after an individualized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of [the] defendants’ statutory duties.” 

While Vought and current CFPB leaders “complain that the district court is attempting to second guess their determination,” that’s not what’s happening, attorneys for the NTEU argued. 

“The district court is determining whether they conducted a particularized assessment at all,” since “almost immediately” evidence emerged that such an assessment hadn’t been conducted, the NTEU attorneys contended.  

A declaration from CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta stated that the bureau conducted the assessment, but declarations filed by the plaintiffs “paint[ed] a dramatically different picture.”

CFPB employees reported they had not consulted any programmatic managers before implementing the reduction in force. And when they raised concerns with CFPB leaders about the court order to conduct the assessment, “they were told that all that mattered was the numbers,” the NTEU asserted.

“‘The direction to ignore the concern,’ they said, ‘came from Mark Paoletta, who said that the numbers-based RIF should move forward, and that leadership would assume the risk.’”

Berman Jackson had “doubts about Paoletta’s declaration, noting that it ‘includes no dates,’ does not describe when the particularized assessment ‘was done,’ ‘doesn’t include the names of the people involved,’ and doesn’t explain ‘how or when the RIF orders came to be justified on April 16 or April 17.’”

Attorneys for the NTEU also argued that cuts the bureau sought to implement last week would violate the data-deletion and consumer response provisions of an injunction Berman Jackson granted last month. 

The CFPB was ordered to ensure its Office of Consumer Response maintains a single, toll-free telephone number, a website and a database collecting consumer complaints, and that complaints be monitored and responded to. But RIF notices were issued to 112 of the 128 employees that work in consumer response, according to the court filing. 

“Even if the defendants made a ‘particularized assessment’ before taking these actions, there remains the question of whether the CFPB can fulfill the Consumer Response obligations imposed by the injunction,” NTEU attorneys argued. 

The chief of staff of the consumer response office said it would have been “‘incapable of performing its statutory obligations shortly after CFPB employees los[t] access to systems on April 18 at 6 PM.’” 

Included in the RIF were employees overseeing the consumer call center, those responsible for directing complaints to companies, staff responsible for maintaining the consumer complaint database, and the supervisor of and several members of the escalated case management team, “whose work the injunction specifically requires the defendants to continue,” the court filing noted.

A district court hearing is set for Monday. 

Separately, the CFPB on Wednesday dropped a Biden-era lawsuit against Reliant Holdings – which does business as Horizon Card Services – and its CEO Robert Kane. The bureau dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t refile the lawsuit in the future. It’s the latest enforcement action the CFPB has scrapped since its leadership changed under President Donald Trump.