A trove of emails and internal communications filed as exhibits in an ongoing federal case surrounding the mass layoffs of nearly 90% of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) employees reveal a government agency beset by chaos at it scrambled to figure out how many people it could afford to fire and still function.
The communications also display the profound influence exerted on the reduction in force (RIF) initiative by Gavin Kliger, a staffer with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who was given access to CFPB systems and provided guidance to top CFPB officials.
The federal lawsuit was filed in February by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents CFPB employees, after the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, shuttered the CFPB and told the bureau’s employees to cease all work activities.
On April 17, 1,483 of the CFPB’s 1,690 employees received an email notifying them that they had been placed on administrative leave, with their employment to be terminated as of June 16. The mass layoffs came after a federal appeals panel halted parts of a preliminary injunction issued March 28 by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson that barred the agency from carrying out mass workforce reductions until the case she is presiding over concluded.
The following day, Judge Jackson again blocked the CFPB from laying off the employees, saying at a court hearing that she was “deeply concerned” that the Trump administration appeared to ignore her previous order, according to reporting by The Associated Press.
The recent court filings show that there were misgivings among CFPB officers about the scope of the planned workforce reductions.
In a particularly revealing exchange, Christopher Chilbert, the CFPB’s chief information officer, expressed his concerns in an email to Adam Martinez, the bureau’s chief operating officer.
“I don’t think we can keep operating even for 60 days without keeping many of these folks,” Chilbert wrote in an email to Martinez on April 17. He then listed 20 employees in a “quick pass” of workers he deemed to be essential to business continuity.
Martinez responded: “Understood and I do not disagree. We will really need to spend the week figuring out a path forward.”
A few hours later, all but 207 CFPB workers received notices that their jobs had been eliminated.
DOGE’s involvement
Kliger, the DOGE staffer, features prominently in the hundreds of pages of court documents filed over the past two weeks. The former Twitter software engineer is currently a senior advisor at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.
According to a declaration by a member of the CFPB RIF team, who submitted the statement anonymously due to fear of retribution, Kliger was in charge of the reduction in force initiative.
“DOGE member Gavin Kliger managed the RIF. He kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday (April 17),” the person, identified as “Alex Doe,” declared. “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent.”
Kliger, reached by phone on Tuesday, declined to comment on the anonymous employee’s claims.
Internal CFPB communications support the fact that Kliger was involved in the RIF. An email from Martinez, sent shortly before the layoff emails were sent, stated: “The notices are set to start going out shortly and will be sent out in batches, which will help ensure that our systems do not crash. My two employees issuing the notices have called in Gavin as this process starts and they will work together throughout this process. Gavin did review the final package template and provided feedback for consistency.”
An April 12 email sent by Kliger that included Martinez and Chilbert among its recipients noted that Kliger had completed his “online privileged user training.”
Later that day, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, sent an email to Martinez and another officer demanding information on what access Kliger had been provided.
“I want to understand what kind of access he has been given,” Paoletta wrote. “I don’t want anything moving forward until I am briefed.”
The next evidentiary hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday. Kliger, Martinez and Paoletta are among the people Judge Jackson has ordered to be present and available to testify at the hearing.
