Around 20 technologists at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were fired on Thursday evening, gutting a team that specialized in understanding Big Tech’s entrance into financial products, three sources familiar with the matter tell The Verge.
It follows an earlier round of layoffs of mostly contractors and probationary employees on Tuesday, as reported by Wired, representing the latest cuts to an agency with oversight over a field that one of Elon Musk’s companies is trying to enter. Musk, who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has announced plans for his company X to enter the payments business, which is an area the CFPB oversees for potential consumer harm.
In a copy of a termination letter obtained by The Verge, the CFPB acting chief human capital officer Adam Martinez references President Donald Trump’s executive order instructing the Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency to help cull the federal workforce. Around 7 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, members of the technology team received the termination notices in their personal emails. One member of the team — who like others in this story spoke on background to candidly share their experiences — said the email didn’t come until about 20 minutes after they noticed they were locked out of Teams and Outlook on their work phone.
“We can’t investigate firms or supervise firms if we don’t understand the technology we’re investigating.”
“The people on this team were the kind of senior people — sometimes at Big Tech firms, sometimes at premier universities — that hiring teams fight tooth and nail over,” says Erie Meyer, who served as chief technologist at the CFPB during the Biden administration. Meyer resigned last Friday, surprised that as a political appointee, new top officials hadn’t asked for her resignation already. She was again surprised to learn that emails to her former colleagues announcing their termination on Thursday still copied her now-defunct work email.
Meyer, who previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission and before that co-founded the US Digital Service — the group that Trump has refashioned into DOGE — hired technologists to the CFPB that could embed across the agency and lend their expertise in everything from research to enforcement. “When I arrived at the bureau, it became immediately clear that Big Tech’s expansion into consumer financial products and services was a trend we needed to be extremely careful to address before it became a crisis,” she says. “We can’t investigate firms or supervise firms if we don’t understand the technology we’re investigating.”
Now that expertise has been ravaged from the agency in one night, and the agency’s former technologists fear that consumer complaints will go unanswered, and companies will be able to get away with shady practices by obscuring them with technical complexity. “Most investigations have some elements of technology, whether it’s an algorithm, a model, some sort of AI, or just data systems,” says one former member of the technology team. “They will claim that it’s too burdensome, or it’s not possible to produce the data … And having someone at the table who understands the databases, who understands the technology at hand is really crucial to being able to push back.”
The CFPB technologists’ backgrounds in the private sector also helped them understand where to look for information in technical systems, says another former staffer. “When you’re a regulatory agency of 1,500 people trying to find out information about hundreds of companies, and each company is ten times your size, the amount of information that is conceivably there, and the techniques available to shroud the useful evidence are so enormous, that having the specific experience of developing the kind of technology that you’re investigating means that you can get the evidence more quickly, you can understand what it means very efficiently, ” they say. “And, you can push back if a big company tries to steamroll an investigation or tries to misrepresent what is actually happening to consumers.”
This is especially helpful when it comes to looking at tech firms, which have entered the financial services sector and often already have a vast array of data on users that could potentially be combined with their spending habits. “I would say a single one of these Big Tech firms is bigger than the top five big banks combined,” Meyer says. The CFPB has managed to take on some of these massive companies. It fined Apple and Goldman Sachs $89 million for allegedly misleading iPhone consumers about interest-free payment options and sued Zelle and the three banks that own it for allegedly enabling more than $870 million in consumer fraud.
DOGE has gained an unusual level of access to agency data
In the course of investigating, the CFPB collects vast amounts of information on companies, which now may be at risk of being accessed by DOGE staff. A recent lawsuit by a federal workers’ union claims that Trump administration official Russell Vought demanded DOGE be given access to non-classified systems at the agency. This level of access is unusual and concerning, a source told The Verge, noting that even senior officials at the agency would typically have to provide a business justification to access data held by the agency.
What kind of information does the CFPB maintain? A document provided to congressional staffers briefed on the CFPB this week notes that the agency has information on enforcement actions and investigations, as well as market research that could include business plans. If that data is accessed without appropriate guardrails, the document warns, it could create unfair competitive advantages for a company like Musk’s X, which plans to move into payments services. The information would include sensitive consumer data, regulatory compliance information on other financial institutions, and insider information that could be used unfairly, the document notes. The White House has insisted that Musk would step back from any work that presented a conflict of interest, but his business dealings are so vast that X’s payments project presents just one example of how his interests could intertwine with the agencies DOGE is trimming down.
When the CFPB collects confidential information during an investigation, companies provide it with the understanding it won’t be shared publicly, says one of the former staffers. “Absolutely there is information that we have that would be beneficial to someone who might be launching a company in the payment space,” they say.
Consumers will also likely feel the hit, now that former staffers say the portal for consumer complaints is likely not being monitored anymore. The agency would receive complaints when consumers were locked out of their bank accounts after data breaches, for example, and could often get their issues addressed within days, the former staffer says. “There is nowhere else” for consumers to go, they say. “They could potentially go to the state attorney generals, but they just don’t have the same capacity.”
Asked if they would take back their job if it came back on the table, the second former technology worker said they would. “I took this job because it was by far the best opportunity I had to help as many people as possible, as much as I possibly could,” they say. “It’s such an impactful job that, yeah, I would definitely take it, provided I felt that I had the capacity to continue helping people.” Despite the slashing of the government workforce in the past couple weeks, this worker believes that’s still possible. “The spirit of the kind of person who is stepping up to help others at their own expense is embedded in almost every federal worker, and there are still plenty of those folks kicking around.”
