The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday issued an order confirming that the CFPB must continue to operate, smacking down the agency leadership’s recent efforts using re-interpretations of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to argue that the bureau would soon run out of funding.
Following a Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo claiming that the Federal Reserve (the bureau’s statutory source of funding) lacks earnings from which the CFPB could take funds, the Acting Director Russell Vought and the CFPB “simply announced to the Court and the plaintiffs that the Bureau’s funding is about to “lapse.””
The Dec. 30 order is the latest development in the almost-year long litigation brought by the CFPB employees union and public interest groups to keep the CFPB functioning in response to the current administration’s crusade to eliminate it. The order answers the plaintiffs’ motion with the court seeking “clarification” to ensure that the bureau could not violate the court’s preliminary injunction on the basis that the CFPB is refusing to request funding from the Federal Reserve.
The order begins notably with an Oct. 2025 quote from Vought, marking the ongoing theme for the bureau this year: “So we want to put [the CFPB] out and we will be successful probably within the next two or three months.”
The court then held that the preliminary injunction to keep the bureau afloat still stands. It noted that the CFPB’s recent “interpretation of the Dodd-Frank Act is contrary to the text and intent of the statute,” and that “the OLC’s flawed reasoning would contravene the plain terms and implicit requirements of” its order.
The case is National Treasury Employees Union v. Russell Vought, as Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Civil Action No. 25-0381 (ABJ).
