With reserves dwindling and ample license from the Trump administration to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by the strategy of his choosing, Russell Vought might have decided otherwise.

Instead, last Friday the acting director of the CFPB requested $145 million from the Federal Reserve to fund the bureau’s second-quarter operations, in compliance with a federal judge’s recent court order.

“Although I disagree with that opinion and order,” wrote Vought in the Jan. 9 letter addressed to the chairman of the U.S. central bank, Jerome Powell, “pursuant to that opinion and order, I have determined that [$145 million] is the amount necessary to carry out the Bureau authorities for the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2026.”

Amy Berman Jackson, a U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia, said in a Dec. 30 memorandum opinion and court order that the CFPB must remain funded while a civil lawsuit that was initially filed against Vought last February proceeds.

In doing so, Jackson rejected a recent legal opinion by the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel that offered a novel interpretation of the CFPB’s funding limitations, claiming that the bureau could not request funding from the “combined earnings” of the Federal Reserve because the central bank has not been profitable since 2022.

Jackson castigated Vought’s theory, writing that “defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding and yet another attempt to achieve the very end the Court’s injunction was put in place to prevent.”

CFPB shutdown efforts

That injunction, issued by Jackson last spring, prohibited Vought from dismantling the agency pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union and five other plaintiffs on behalf of fired CFPB workers.

Plaintiffs allege that Vought is attempting to wind down the CFPB short of congressional action, which most legal experts agree would be necessary for the agency to cease its statutory obligations.

The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to hear arguments in the ongoing legal battle, a hearing for which is scheduled for February.

Vought, who also serves as director of the White House budget office, has been transparent in his intent to put down the financial watchdog since he took custody of it last February, in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term.

At his direction, the CFPB has effectively ceased all supervisory and enforcement activities. Initiatives furthering the closure of the bureau span mass layoffs, the wholesale closing out of early-stage compliance citations lodged under previous leadership, and ceasing run-of-the-mill bank examinations — a core function of the agency.

Claiming in December to be unable to request funding from the Federal Reserve, government lawyers said the CFPB would run out of money as early as January, thereby preventing the bureau from paying workers whose termination has been held up in courts.

“Neither the statute, the injunction, nor the Fed’s willingness to pay has changed, the only new circumstance is the administration’s determination to eliminate an agency created by Congress with the stroke of pen, even while the matter is before the Court of Appeals,” wrote Jackson, insisting that the CFPB remain funded while cases against it proceed.

Funding consumer protection

By law, the CFPB is funded through cash transfers “from the combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System,” requested on a quarterly basis by the bureau’s director in amounts “determined by the director to be reasonably necessary.”

That funding structure was upheld as constitutional in a 7-2 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024.

Vought’s predecessor as CFPB head under President Joe Biden, Rohit Chopra, requested $285 million in funding from the Federal Reserve for the second quarter of 2024, $286 million for the second quarter of 2023 and $276 million for the second quarter of 2022.

In 2022, 2023 and 2024, the annual totals of Chopra’s quarterly funding requests swelled from $641.5 million to $721.2 million to $729.4 million, respectively, according to archived transfer request letters on the CFPB’s website.

The funding request made Friday under Vought’s stated duress was the first request he has made since he took over as acting director on Feb. 7, 2025.

In a funds transfer letter requesting $0 from Powell last March, Vought said the bureau’s current funds “are more than sufficient — and are, in fact, excessive — to carry out its authorities in a manner that is consistent with the public interest.”

Defining the “public interest” and assigning a dollar figure to fund it, however, has increasingly become a matter of political priorities.

For example, Trump’s signature tax cut and spending bill, signed by the president in July 2025, lowered the cap on CFPB funding requests from 12% of the Federal Reserve’s annual operating expenses to 6.5%, the lowest in bureau history, according to CNBC.