The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has apparently plugged itself back in.
Visits to the bureau’s website, as of Thursday, lead to a page focused on consumer complaints rather than the “404 error” and illustration of an unplugged socket that have dominated the top of the site since the early February weekend Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought became the agency’s acting director.
The CFPB’s former chief technologist, Erie Meyer – now a witness for the National Treasury Employees Union in its case against the bureau – prominently mentioned the website’s error message in a declaration submitted last week to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Such an error message “can have severe repercussions,” Meyer told the court. Specifically, consumers “will likely abandon the site” when they see it, she said. Further, a 404 error can prevent search engine crawlers from accessing the site, disrupting its visibility among search results.
Those top results, Meyer wrote, “have been replaced in some cases by content farms or worse, scam sites … leaving vulnerable consumers to be targeted by fraudulent actors instead of receiving accurate, reliable information from the Bureau.”
“This disruption is not just a technical oversight; it is a direct risk to consumer protection efforts, as the Bureau's content is now being supplanted by potentially harmful, deceptive websites,” Meyer wrote.
Early attempts by the CFPB to remove the 404 error from the homepage were denied, Christopher Chilbert, the bureau’s chief information officer, wrote in an email that was included Tuesday in evidence in the case.
“My understanding is that the decision to delete the homepage was made by Acting Director Vought, and it was not an error made by the members of the [Department of Government Efficiency] team,” Chilbert wrote. DOGE infiltrated the CFPB on Feb. 6.
The addressing of consumer complaints has become perhaps the most often-cited example, in the NTEU’s court case, of work the CFPB is mandated by law to provide. The complaint portal has seen an 80% reduction in responses between Feb. 13 and roughly the end of the month, according to an analysis by the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA.
Also included Tuesday among more than 100 pages of emails and other internal messages is a scathing rebuke from the CFPB’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, to Cassandra Huggins, the bureau’s principal deputy assistant director of supervision policy.
A Monday email from Huggins to the CFPB’s supervisory staff was apparently leaked to Reuters, highlighting miscommunication among the bureau’s top officials, concerning the specifics of Vought’s stop-work order.
In her email Monday, Huggins cited “quite a bit of confusion” surrounding a message CFPB employees received a day earlier from Paoletta.
“It has come to my attention … that some employees have not been performing statutorily required work,” Paoletta wrote Sunday. “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.”
Huggins on Monday wrote that CFPB supervisory employees have “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 Monday.
Paoletta wrote Huggins late Tuesday, expressing “significant concerns” that her Monday message to staff “directly contradicts” what Paoletta wrote Sunday.
"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 Tuesday. "Nothing I have said or written since then contradicts that."
Paoletta acknowledged that Huggins asked him for clarification but “as I am dual hatted and have job duties at OMB, I was not able to review and respond to your email yesterday.”
“Your actions severely undermine the Agency leadership’s ability to supervise the agency staff and to ensure that statutorily required duties are being performed,” Paoletta wrote Tuesday, referring to Huggins’ Monday email, saying she was operating from Feb. 8 guidance rather than Sunday’s.
Further, Paoletta noted the leak to the media and asked Huggins to respond within roughly an hour, including any information she may have had on the source.
Huggins, in her response, noted that she did not have information on the leak and “did not intend” to undermine agency leadership.
“My only intention was to ensure that our staff did not act against the direction in the February 8th email from Acting Director Vought to cease all supervisory and examination activity,” she wrote.
