In this episode, we speak with Tyler Creighton about the ongoing struggle to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from defunding and closure at the hands of Russell Vought in the second Trump Administration. Creighton is a lawyer at the CFPB and a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), Chapter 335. Before joining the CFPB, Creighton clerked for the Massachusetts Appeals Court and, prior to that, he was an organizer for pro-democracy reforms at Common Cause and ReThink Media. We talk with Creighton about life at the CFPB under the leadership of Vought, central architect of the notorious Project 2025 document and avowed opponent of the agency he now directs.
During our conversation, Creighton details how, in spite of Vought’s attempts to defund and close the agency, the CFPB continues to survive. In Creighton’s telling, the agency’s endurance owes in no small part to the continuous labor actions undertaken by the NTEU and its members. In February 2025, for example, the union sued the Trump Administration, securing an injunction against Vought’s efforts to close the agency. (Read the judge’s extraordinary Memorandum Opinion here.) Then, in late December, a federal district court judge ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the CFPB through the Federal Reserve, contradicting Vought’s absurd claim that the CFPB can no longer seek financing from the Fed because the nation’s Central Bank is operating at a loss.
Despite the NTEU’s string of successes, the fate of the CFPB still remains to be determined. The good news, however, is that there are ways that you can support the bureau as it rounds into its second year of the second Trump Administration. Learn more about the fight to save the CFPB from the CFPB Union website. Follow and share news from the NTEU account on Bluesky. Join the union’s public demonstrations, if you live near or find yourself visiting Washington D.C. You can also help fund the NTEU’s activities by purchasing any number of cheeky items in their online merchandise shop.
Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure
Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Billy Saas
Tyler Creighton, welcome to Money on the Left.
Tyler Creighton
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Billy Saas
It is a pleasure to have you. We are looking to talk to you about a lot of things. You work principally now as a lawyer with the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Could you just maybe kick us off by telling us a little bit about what that’s like now in January of 2026?
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. The past year at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been just a little bit different than my prior few years at the CFPB. I will say, I am an attorney at the CFPB. I’m here just talking in my own personal capacity. Nothing I say can be attributed to the bureau, representing my public sector union: the National Treasurer Employees Union.
But, yeah, it’s been an interesting year. I joined the bureau in 2022, so I’m actually a relatively new employee compared to a lot of other people that have been there since the start. When Trump got elected, it was a little unclear exactly what was going to happen to the CFPB.
It’s kind of been a little bit of a political lightning rod for its entire existence since 2011. But we didn’t really know what to expect. Oddly, we kind of flew under the radar for the first month. Our former director who had been appointed by President Biden, Rohit Chopra, stayed on until the end of January, and into the first week of February before he was finally fired by the president.
That’s when everything really changed. Trump appointed the architect of Project 2025, Russel Vought, as our acting director. Within days of him being appointed, he had closed down all of our office buildings and kicked everybody out and had sent an all staff email saying, “stop performing any work task, whatsoever.”
Everything just kind of came to a crashing halt and a lot has happened since then. They have been trying to close us down since that first week in February and, although they have really mucked around with the operations of the bureau – despite the best efforts – it is still standing.
I think this is largely in part due to a lot of dedicated workers at the bureau who have been organizing through our union and using litigation to keep the bureau alive as Congress intended.
Scott Ferguson
Can you tell us a little bit about just your own personal history? How did you come to the CFPB? You’re a lawyer. What’s your background? What’s your specialty? What do you do at the CFPB in particular?
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. So, I’m actually a relatively new lawyer. I graduated law school in 2021 and I clerked for a year on the Massachusetts appeals court, and then went directly from there to the CFPB in 2022. I work in our Office of Supervision. I’ve primarily focused on the mortgage market, although I’ve also done some work on student loans and auto loans.
I think a lot of people don’t really know what “supervision” means at the CFPB or “supervision” across other financial regulators. But, at the CFPB, in terms of compliance, we kind of have our enforcement division, which is, I think, what people generally think of when they think of regulators. These are the folks that are running investigations and suing bad actors when they find potential legal violations.
That’s all very public. These lawsuits will be on the public docket and you can read the complaint and you can see all the details. Supervision is very different. It is a confidential process. This is an authority that was granted to us by Congress and the Dodd-Frank act, which established the CFPB and gives us authority to conduct periodic examinations of certain financial companies that are under our authority.
What that means is we request a bunch of information and documents from an institution, and then we have teams of expert examiners who are looking at the information and making sure that policies and procedures of the companies and their functions are all complying with our various federal statutes and regulations. If we identify any problems, we try to resolve the issues in a collaborative process with the companies.
It all remains confidential. For the most part, everything is kind of resolved in that confidential space. It only kind of comes out later if companies are disagreeing with our assessments, or it seems like the conduct is particularly egregious or intentional in which case the issue might end up getting into the enforcement side and then leading to litigation.
I’ve been doing that work since 2022. Unfortunately, as public reports show, that work has more or less not existed since February of 2025. Just hoping that we can kind of get back to actually supervising the companies that Congress intended us to.
Billy Saas
And so that’s just a function of companies, I guess. What side is that lack of continued supervision activity most attributable to. Is that a function of the top down directives from Russ Vought, or is it companies not feeling like they need to participate any longer? Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?
Tyler Creighton
It is directly attributable to Russ Vought stop work order in February that, for all intents and purposes, really hasn’t fully disappeared or really been rescinded.
Scott Ferguson
So what determines what is actionable work versus what must be stopped?
Tyler Creighton
You know, we are civil servants. We don’t go off and sort of just do our own thing. We are directed by political leadership on what our priorities are and what the work is. We have not been authorized or directed to do the supervision work that we had previously been done.
Billy Saas
It’s similar on the enforcement side, I would presume as well.
Tyler Creighton
Yes. I’m not on the enforcement side, but yes, I think public reporting shows that there isn’t enforcement going on. Investigations are not continuing. And you’ve seen publicly that a lot of open litigation has either been dismissed or settled, including a number of open consent orders that companies and the CFPB had already reached and had not yet expired have been terminated prior to the expiration date in the consent order.
Scott Ferguson
We’ve started to talk about the division of labor and the division of the institution a bit. But I was wondering, to the best of your ability, I know you haven’t been there from the beginning, but can you give us a little more detailed sense of when the CFPB arises? Under what circumstances? The specific things it was tasked to do and what it has been doing ever since.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. So, the sort of neat and tidy story of the CFPB’s founding is that it’s really a product of the subprime mortgage mortgage crisis that triggered the 2008 global financial crisis and then the Great Recession that followed, which, as many people remember, there was kind of rampant fraud in the mortgage markets.
There was a lot of predatory lending that led people to default on their mortgage and then massive foreclosure crisis. And in the wake of that, or really in the in the midst of it, Senator Elizabeth Warren, but then-law professor Elizabeth Warren, wrote a couple of journal articles in like 2007, 2008, that talked about or envisioned a new federal agency that would really be charged principally or entirely with regulating consumer financial products with the eyes of the consumer in mind or the benefits of the consumer in mind.
She kind of analogized, saying “we have agencies to stop unsafe toys and toasters. But we don’t really have that for financial products.” And so she envisioned this agency as kind of being analogous to some agencies that already existed. Those articles resulted in Congress passing the Dodd-Frank act in 2010, which is one of then President Obama and the newly elected Democratic majorities in Congress first major bills.
The idea there was to essentially consolidate a bunch of split and overlapping authorities that are then split across a bunch of agencies and consolidate that all into a single agency that could take a more holistic and dedicated approach with consumers that would be front and center. Then it also added some new authorities as well.
At this point, I already talked about the enforcement and supervision aspects of the bureau. There’s also the consumer complaint database, which some listeners might have used before. I think there’s been like 5 million consumers who have filed a complaint since 2011 when that started. That’s been a tremendous tool to quickly resolve individual problems between consumers and companies where previously, maybe the company didn’t feel like they needed to do anything, but now there’s kind of this public record out there when consumers are complaining and they feel more compelled. Then, at the bureau, there’s also a lot of market research that folks are doing to identify potential risks and hazards and new products, new financial markets. Then there’s a lot of consumer education resources that the bureau puts out.
In my mind, some of the clearest, concise information on what you should be thinking about when you’re getting a mortgage. Like, here’s step one here, step two… I was working at the bureau at the time, I think it was right before I started working there and was buying my first home and was just like all over the website using the resources, which have been, I think, a huge help for people.
It’s not just mortgages, it’s auto loans, or if you have problems with credit reporting, just a ton of great information.
Scott Ferguson
Is that all still up?
Tyler Creighton
It is all still up. Yeah. I definitely was worried in the early days about a lot of that stuff going away in some way.
Scott Ferguson
It’s not too woke.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah, it’s practical enough. We haven’t gotten into a lot of the litigation that has been going on, but there is an injunction that’s still in place that is preventing the kind of full shutdown and wrap up of the bureau.
I don’t know to what extent that injunction is planning on keeping up a lot of these existing resources that the bureau has put together over the years.
Scott Ferguson
Can you tell us a little bit more about how the consumer complaint database works? I mean, I’ve never used it, so I have no idea. Is it like a Yelp review? You can just like, have an account log on or is it a little more formal? Do you need a lawyer or something like that?
Tyler Creighton
I don’t know if it’s quite Yelp-review status, but it’s closer to that than like a formal thing where you need to write out a very legalese complaint. It’s very accessible. You can log in and you put the company that you have issue with, you write a narrative about what happened and on the public facing side, if you put in any personally identifiable information that will not appear on the public side of the consumer complaint database, but other people can see what you wrote about, even if they’re just like your neighbor or whatever. There is a rule in Dodd-Frank that the companies have to provide a response.
It doesn’t necessarily say it’s got to be a substantive response or it has to rectify or agree with the consumer. I mean, the consumer can be potentially wrong, but they have to provide a response. By and large, if the consumer has raised a legitimate issue, you look at the company response and the company will have provided some kind of remedy, whether it’s erasing a charge on the person’s credit card that shouldn’t have been there or fixing some inaccurate information on the consumer’s credit report or whatever it is.
Oftentimes the complaint, if it’s legitimate, will result in some kind of action that benefits the consumer. On the bureau side, all of those complaints are taken into account when you’re thinking about enforcement and supervision. Where’s the risk? Sort of like an early kind of warning system to the regulators of where there’s risk, where there’s problems, because obviously the consumers are on the front lines. They know where the issues are and so it’s a great resource for the CFPB to figure out where to dedicate finite resources.
Scott Ferguson
Obviously, the CFPB has a history of contestation around it. This is maybe the most life threatening, so to speak, battle that the institution has faced thus far. It’s not like the first Trump administration was very happy about this institution either. So I was curious if you have a sense of the history of largely Republican challenges before this particular present moment.
I know from doing a little bit of research that there was a court case that had to do with how the director was appointed and the reasons that the director could be removed. So any of this that you can speak to, to just contextualize what’s going on now.
00;17;36;10 – 00;18;08;14
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. There’s a lot of history there. You know, it’s no secret that most politicians on the right and Wall Street banks have not been the biggest fan of the CFPB, and have tried various ways to reform it or get rid of it in whole. There have been two very high profile Supreme Court cases challenging aspects of the CFPB structure.
The first one, which you mentioned, was about the ability of the president to fire at will the director of the agency. If folks been following any of the legal cases going on in the current era, this will be very familiar to people, because we have Supreme Court cases about this very issue with regard to the FTC commissioners (Federal Trade Commission) and also potentially down the road, the Federal Reserve, and the ability of the independence of the fed and whether or not the president can can get rid of fed chairs.
So anyway, back in, I think it was in 2019, there was a challenge to the provision of Dodd-Frank, which said that the director could only be removed for cause. That was challenged. And the Supreme Court struck down that provision. Since that time, the director has been essentially removable at will by the president.
Since that happened, the presidents have used that power. So, when Joe Biden came in 2021, he used it to get rid of the existing director who had been appointed by Trump during his first term. Then when Trump came in in 2025, he used it to get rid of Chopra, Biden’s director.
The kind of more existential case was in 2024. That one challenged the constitutionality of the CFPB funding structure, or funding mechanism. We are a little bit distinct, not entirely unique, but different from a lot of other federal agencies and that we are not part of the Congress’s annual appropriations process. So, you know, all this talk of government shutdown last year, and currently they are trying to get the funding bills together so we don’t go into another shutdown at the end of January here, but the CFPB is actually not part of that. We have a dedicated funding mechanism. Where the director is required to request money from the Federal Reserve who gets money from interest payments and fees, paid by their member banks.
Our directors are required to request money from the fed to carry out our functions. Congress has tapped the total amount of money that we can request, but that funding is just always there. It doesn’t require Congress to pass a new bill each year saying like, this is how much money is available for the CFPB.
The constitutionality of that mechanism was challenged by an industry trade group. Ultimately they lost pretty bigly, in terms of our president, and I forget the exact breakdown, but it was like 7-2 or 8-1 in terms of the breakdown of the Supreme Court justices. They were not able to convince many of the justices, including some that are very far on the right and sympathetic to these types of arguments, that the mechanism was unconstitutional.
We survived that. Then, obviously, more recently we’ve come under the attack of just trying to shut down the whole place by pure legal fiat. Congress hasn’t repealed the agency or anything, but we’re just going to try to shut it down because we want to.
Billy Saas
Well, thanks for that. It brings us nice and up to date. There’s more that we can say about those current court cases. And I want to talk about the union’s efforts, and advancing those cases, and defending the CFPB from those attacks. I want to step back just a little bit.
We mentioned the complaints division or the complaints process that consumers previously had available through the CFPB. In addition to the enforcement supervision, for the complaints, I understand that those would sort of become the grounds for action. Is that correct? Like, on behalf of enforcement or from the CFPB, there could be efforts taken to address those complaints.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. I mean, so obviously we have finite resources over a rollover of these massive markets with hundreds of hundreds of players, and we have to take in whatever information we can to help focus where we’re going to use those resources. So complaints are one of many different data streams, whether it’s enforcement or people in supervision, that we are using to help identify which companies we should be looking at, which practices we should be looking at.
Sometimes what you get with the complaints is maybe that individual consumer’s complaint was rectified. So they were charged an illegal late fee on their mortgage and the company said, “Okay, great. Yes, we did that. Sorry. We will credit your account,” but they don’t really say anything about if this affects other people or is this a one-off thing?
Was it a systemic problem? You don’t necessarily get that information. The other divisions can kind of use, “oh, there’s this one consumer, maybe there was a couple,” and it sort of indicates, okay, maybe this is more a systemic problem that requires additional looking into and ensuring that it wasn’t just this one consumer who got their issue rectified, but actually all of the impacted consumers got the issue rectified.
Billy Saas
Yeah. So in any case, it’s a line of communication between everyday citizens, consumers, and the government. That’s a highly valuable thing. I wonder if you could say something about where we’re at now with the stop work order and, it is my understanding that the closest equivalent to the complaint line is like individual state attorneys general, right?
If there are bad actors in the financial sector, and maybe you can tell me if there are others, the most charitable reading of the perspective on the argument for closing the CFPB would be like, “there are already enforcement mechanisms in place at the state level.” What exists and maybe help us see through that argument.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. The consumer complaint database is a very, very powerful tool. I highly recommend that consumers continue to use it even in this time, because I think companies are continuing to respond to it despite the CFPB’s kind of beleaguered status at the moment.
In terms of other regulators out there, if the CFPB’s current trajectory continues and it is not operating at anything close to what it was doing in 2024 and before that, the states will step in to a certain degree. But the attorney general’s offices are already overtaxed on other things.
They also are only responsible for the actions and the residents of their own state. So, you know, if the AG of Massachusetts brings a case because they’ve noticed that some mortgage lender is selling predatory loans, that’s not necessarily going to help the person that is in Mississippi that is also getting predatory loans from the same provider.
It creates this real patchwork where, depending on where you live in the country, you’re going to be given more or less protection from these companies. The bureau has this kind of national outlook and has a lot more resources in terms of lawyers, but we also have economists and people that are familiar with the market and data technologists and all these other people that a lot of state regulators don’t really have. It really helps to identify these new products that are complicated. It’s not necessarily obvious how they work or how they might be harming consumers. I think that’s been really important to have at the CFPB. There’s been a lot of innovation in financial services. And then also, a lot of these states have just come to rely on the CFPB expertise and that they’re going to be there.
So, yeah, again, they’ll adapt, but I think, in the end, consumers will be the ones paying the price.
Billy Saas
If the CFPB continues down the way it’s going, they’re probably not going to rechannel that direct fed funding to the individual states attorney generals.
Tyler Creighton
No. Yeah. Probably not, probably not.
Billy Saas
And so those resources go away and I think it would increase the burden on those states individually, who are, under the current regime, limited to tax revenue and local politics.
Tyler Creighton
This just reminds me of how kind of nonsensical getting rid of the CFPB is. You know, it all started when Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) folks came in trying to eliminate fraud and waste, or purportedly trying to eliminate fraud and waste. The truth is that, at the CFPB, prior to the current administration, we had returned something like $21 billion or more to consumers through our efforts.
If you break that down in terms of how much money is going back to consumers versus how much money is going to pay for the CFPB’s operating cost, it’s like almost a $3 return on investment for every dollar that goes to the bureau is going to result in nearly $3 going back out to consumers, because we’ve identified some illegal practice and gotten refunds.
So, there’s obviously bloat in the government, and probably some bloat at the CFPB, but like, by and large, the consumers and Americans are benefiting greatly from the relatively small amount of money that was going to the Bureau to keep it running.
Scott Ferguson
So I’m chomping at the bit to hear the story of the DOGE occupation of this. But before we do, I guess I wanted to ask one more preliminary question. I have not studied this document closely, maybe I should have, but Project 2025, which is Vought’s little brainchild. As far as I’m aware, it includes language about what the intention of this administration was when it came to the CFPB. Were people in the agency reading Project 2025 and sort of like, I don’t know, bracing themselves for this or strategizing or not really.
Tyler Creighton
I don’t remember that so much. I mean, there were probably some conversations here or there of people who had taken a peek. I mean, honestly, I don’t. I don’t know if you have looked at it recently, but it’s pretty sparse on the CFPB. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones there. I mean, it kind of gestured that, “Oh, yeah, we should just get rid of this whole thing,” but then it ultimately has like a few bullets that are much less than that. It seems fixated on a completely fabricated idea. I honestly don’t even know where they got this idea from. The civil penalties fund, which is the fund that the bureau operates when we do enforcement litigation and the companies have to pay some kind of penalty to us, and then that gets redistributed back out to consumers.
They have this completely fabricated idea that the penalty fund was just the slush fund for like liberal advocacy groups. That’s like the main thing that it’s focused on in the Project 2025 document. Honestly, I just don’t even know where that comes from. It sounded like there was a minimal amount of consumer education that’s been funded through the penalty fund, absolutely tiny compared to the amount of overall money.
Maybe that went to some groups that are involved in that consumer education. But like to say that it’s just this slush fund for liberal groups and that’s the reason why we got to get rid of the whole thing, it just struck me as really grasping at straws there.
I don’t think we talked about it too much, but there was a lot of waiting. Elon and company have been talking about taking the chainsaw to the government, and it was unclear what was going to happen because a lot of people at the bureau have been there since close to the start.
They went through Trump one. They thought, incorrectly – now we’ve all learned – that it wouldn’t be something similar to Trump one in that, things changed, things slowed down a little bit, but after some initial kind of bumpy-ness that happens with any change over administration, from what I’ve understood, I wasn’t there so I can’t speak to it from personal experience, but like they were doing similar work to what they had been doing before. Priorities changed a little bit. Maybe they weren’t using some legal theories that they had been using before. But, you know, they were doing good work. I think people kind of thought that something similar would happen, and were obviously proven wrong by that.
But, I think in those first couple of months after the election, while we waited to see what was going to happen, that I think that was sort of the optimistic take.
Scott Ferguson
So walk us through this early timeline of Musk and DOGE first. Is that prior to Vought?
Tyler Creighton
It’s concurrent, really. You’ll have to forgive me a little bit because at this point, it’s been almost a year and a lot of this was like moving quickly. I wasn’t personally one of the people who was in the building when this was all kind of going down. Musk and his folks have been infiltrating other agencies in the lead up to us.
So we had kind of already seen the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) playbook: go in there, take control of all of the computer and data systems and then just start quickly closing up shop.
The exact tick tock of this was, I think it was January 31st or February 1st, Cobra gets fired. Initially, Trump appoints Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, as acting director. But on the president’s first day, he sends a message to all staff with six bullet points or something like that, of the work that should stop including enforcement, oddly not supervision.
So we continued to do that.
Scott Ferguson
Is that because he didn’t know about it?
Tyler Creighton
That’s my speculation. But I don’t know for sure. So we continued and then, by the end of that first week of February, the first DOGE people started accessing the building, which is right across the street from the White House in DC. Then Trump appointed Vought right at the end of the week.
He sent out an email saying, “you can’t come into the building anymore,” and then on that following Monday sent an email saying much more explicit things, expanding on the six bulleted things that Bessent said we weren’t allowed to do and just said, “don’t perform any work whatsoever.” Then it was really in that first week under Vought when things were moving very, very quickly, we had been kicked out the building and told not to work.
The union actually organized a very quick action at the building, like that, I think even before it was officially closed. So folks were picketing out front and then Vought used that picketing as the pretext for closing the building, saying that, “my employees feel unsafe coming to the building because a bunch of folks are chanting and holding signs…”
Scott Ferguson
Who are also employees.
Tyler Creighton
Who are also employees, yeah, exactly. In that preceding week – this all kind of later comes out in litigation, we were not totally privy to it at the time – but basically there starts being leaks to members of the union that folks in H.R. are racing to fire everybody, to just completely axe the place in the same way that they did with USAID. Running just exactly the same playbook.
So as that information is trickling out through union members and colleagues, we are getting legal counsel through our national union to figure out what to do about that. They file a lawsuit very, very quickly in that first week and are able to get a temporary restraining order by that Friday immediately following Vought’s appointment and it later comes out when we are arguing for a preliminary injunction. A temporary restraining order is very temporary and so we’re filing for a preliminary injunction, which would hopefully stop firings, stop the shutdown going while the litigation that our union had filed precedes. While we are gathering evidence, while our attorneys are gathering evidence for that preliminary injunction, we get all of the details about what was happening in that first week. I encourage people, if you have a minute to go look at the district court’s opinion when the chief finally granted the pulmonary injunction, that’s just like documenting all of the emails and the meetings and everything that’s happening. They are just absolutely racing to fire 1700 people. It’s up until like the moment on late Friday, there are attorneys in court with the DOJ trying to argue for this temporary restraining order. H.R. is getting emails that there’s this court proceeding happening right now, and they’re like, “no, just get it done. Get the firings out the door, like we need to get them done before the court acts.” It’s like Friday afternoon. They’re trying to race to get them out. The court just got it under the wire to get the temporary restraining order in place before everybody at the agency was fired.
Scott Ferguson
Can I ask a potentially sensitive question which you may not be able to answer, but are the HR folks, they’re people in the agency who do HR? So they’re just sort of following instructions in doing all this?
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. So I mean, DOGE was a small-ish operation. They needed actual people who had expertise and some experience actually working in government and know how things work to effectuate what they wanted to do. So in the government, we have these things called reductions in force, which are effectively like mass layoffs when an agency director wants to change priorities or Congress has cut funding again. None of that happened here.
But like, they were trying to use these reduction in forces to get rid of everybody. They’re using the H.R. people within the CFPB to get that done. You can look at the litigation. A number of people filed anonymous declarations and actually then testified in court about what was going on in these meetings that they were being brought into about, where they were just trying to quickly fire everybody before the court was able to get the restraining order done.
And actually, I forgot an important detail with some of my fellow employees who were actually fired during that first week, because it was horrendous and more uncertain for them. But, yeah, there were successful firings of about 200 of our term and probationary employees in that week of February, while they were racing to get rid of the rest of us.
Fortunately, those folks were reinstated through our litigation. But it was obviously unexpected from them and there was one employee who has a big profile in the Atlantic. She was in her doctor’s office getting a cancer diagnosis when she was illegally fired, or when she received an email saying, “you’re fired.”
It’s not the worst part about it, but just kind of an insult to injury, with these notices, because they were trying to get them out so quickly, they failed the mail merges. It just said, “dear [first name, last name],” instead of like “dear, ‘the actual person’s name,’ you’ve been terminated because your skills and needs are no longer relevant to the work that we do.”
So, yeah, it was a horrendous week, but fortunately, we are still here a year later because a lot of people moved quickly to get into court and stop this.
Scott Ferguson
So what’s been going on this year after the first week?
Tyler Creighton
Yeah, it’s hard to think back on it all. In those first few weeks and months, it was very frenetic and really all-hands-on-deck with people really stepping up to make these declarations to the court where they’re essentially being whistleblowers to talk about what was going on on the inside with these firings.
The union is organizing weekly pickets out in front of our building. We had a number of court dates where we’re organizing events out in front of the court. Everyone was very fired up and working together to kind of support the litigation that was going on inside the courtroom. We weren’t the attorneys involved in it, but the rest of us were outside, telling the public the story about what was going on and why this was important.
I think that slowed down a little bit as the litigation dragged on, but we’re continuing to organize and get our message out about why the bureau is important and why we should be able to get back to work and also about workers rights. These are good working class, well-paid jobs and there’s something to be said about how we’re in the middle of an affordability crisis, and they’re trying to get rid of these jobs that are very secure for people who are in the middle class.
So we’re continuing to fight on against the immediate shutdown. One thing that Congress was successful in doing last year was actually lowering our funding cap. They cut the max funding that we can get almost in half. So we’ve been continuing to work with our legislative partners to hopefully get that reversed and get the cap back up.
Then we’re pounding the drum to get Vought impeached, which is another priority for us as a union.
Scott Ferguson
I have another question. How has the press been in your experience and the collective experience of the union? Does the press ask the right questions? Does it tell the right stories? Does it care enough? Does it focus on what’s going on enough? I’m just kind of curious to hear you talk about your experience precisely with publicity and, like, the politics of publicity around this crisis.
Tyler Creighton
I think publicity around these kinds of major rule of law, democracy stories can be tough for the press, but by and large, I think they have covered this past year of the bureau well. There obviously is the day to day of what’s going on in the litigation. But there’s also been a number of great pieces about what this means more broadly to consumers.
A lot of good consumer snapshots of people who had been helped in the past by the bureau and the fact that if we ceased to exist, that person who was facing foreclosure and was able to grab this lifeline to keep them and keep their family in their house, that won’t be there anymore.
There’s been a lot of good reporting on that front. There’s a lot going on in the Trump administration right now, it’s hard to keep anything focused. Where does the CFPB rank in the list of the many, many other things that are happening right now?
Is it the most important thing? People have disagreements about that. I think I’ve generally been impressed with the coverage. I think one difficulty is like, how do you tell the next part of the story?
It’s like, there’s only so many times you can say, “oh, here’s this consumer who was helped by the bureau, and that help won’t exist anymore,” right? Only so many people can write that story. So what’s the next page in the story as we continue. We’re coming up on the year anniversary of this whole saga.
That’s nothing unique to this particular fight. It’s true for any kind of advocacy policy fight that you’re going to have. Before I became a lawyer, I did communications advocacy for issues around campaign finance and voting rights and we had the same kind of issues on those topics as well.
Billy Saas
Journalists love a news peg. Perhaps the year anniversary will generate some additional impetus for coverage here.
Tyler Creighton
I totally agree with you. It’s something I’ve been thinking about because this conversation’s a good impetus for it. It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk tweeted “R.I.P. CFPB,” a year ago and we’re still here. That can’t necessarily be said for some other agencies that got targeted.
What’s the difference? I think the existence of our union and the organizing around that has actually been pretty key to that. There’s been some allusions in some of the reporting to that effect, but I think it’s a little bit of an untold story that the organizing of the workers themselves has been pretty critical to preserving this agency that Congress created. It might not exist if the union hadn’t been as organized and kind of jumped on the issue as quickly as it did.
Scott Ferguson
Something you told us before we started recording was that Vought is this kind of spectral presence who never shows up. You said you’ve never seen this man, who is your boss. Has anybody seen him at the agency? Presumably Musk actually showed up into the building to occupy it, and people saw him, but, has anybody had direct communication with Vought?
Tyler Creighton
Not sure. Yeah, I have not. Initially we were 1700 people. We’ve lost a lot of people. But like, you know, with organizations of that size, you’re going to get email communications talking about organization priorities and what we’re doing and have broad staff meetings to kind of keep everybody on the same page. That has not been a thing that is happening at the Bureau.
So, yeah, he is the director, but, I can’t say I’ve had any direction from him.
Scott Ferguson
So there’s been more recent litigation and litigation that has gone in the agency’s favor. Back to this funding question, maybe you can tell us about the arguments made on both sides and how this has all played out.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. It’s funny when you said, “in the agency’s favor,” it actually technically went against the agency, if you think about the agency and who currently runs it. But, yeah, it went in favor of keeping the agency alive and protecting consumers down the road. We secured a preliminary injunction back in March against firings, against contract cancellations, against closing up shop essentially, or to kind of generalize. But, while that injunction has been in place, Russ Vought has not requested any additional funding from the Federal Reserve since he took over. The agency happened to have quite a large balance when he took over, so that wasn’t a problem for a while.
Scott Ferguson
Does that tend to be a regular periodic request, or is it just sort of as needed, whenever?
Tyler Creighton
It’s a little slightly out of my expertise on this, but I think it’s generally been quarterly. I’d have to look back at the statute on whether or not it actually needs to be quarterly or it can kind of be as needed. I think, in effect, it kind of acts as needed.
Prior directors have planned out the year and have a sense of how much money it’s going to be required and then make quarterly withdrawals for that money. But anyway, Vought hadn’t requested any money, so while this injunction against firings existed, we were quickly dwindling our reserves. It was getting to the point where he was saying that the agency wasn’t going to have any more money at some point in early 2026.
The position he was taking was this, novel and fairly ludicrous legal argument that Congress created this dedicated funding for the CFPB by allowing it to withdraw money from the Federal Reserve’s revenue. But, the language that that Congress used was the Federal Reserve’s, quote unquote, combined earnings. To date, that has been understood as the Federal Reserve revenue. So any money that it earns. He took the position that, “Oh, no, actually combined earnings is referring to profits,” which is a weird construction for a government agency that isn’t a for-profit enterprise that’s trying to make profits. But, you know, putting that aside, he took the position that it is the feds operating revenue minus their expenses.
Since sometime in 2022, if you do that calculation, it’s actually a negative. So it’s been losing money, if we were to analogize it to a for-profit institution, which it’s not. So he said, “I’m not permitted to request additional money because Congress hasn’t provided any set aside.”
Why would Congress have said, “okay, we’re going to have this dedicated funding mechanism, but it only works if the fed has profits.” But if it doesn’t, then this agency just disappears for that time. You know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But, our lawyers went in and filed a motion to clarify that this novel interpretation, that had not been used before, wouldn’t let the agency off the hook for complying with the preliminary injunction against firing staff, against canceling contracts, against shutting down the agency.
In late December, the district court agreed and said, “yeah, this interpretation of the statute of combined earnings makes no sense. You, Vought, have manufactured this funding crisis, and I am not going to allow this thing that you’ve manufactured totally on your own accord to take you out of the injunction that is still in place.”
Essentially, they are setting up this scenario where you could either request money and comply with the injunction or you could continue to drive the CFPB into bankruptcy and therefore be out of compliance with the conjunction and face the consequences of that. Just last week, Vought ended up saying, “Okay, although we disagree with your opinion, federal judge, we will request the money.”
So he requested enough money for, according to the letter to the court, for this quarter, which I guess will go until March. So that’s where we’re at now. Concurrently, the preliminary injunction that started this whole thing is under appeal to the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments in that case in late February.
Billy Saas
We have seen a lot of things over the last year, but administration officials complying with judicial orders is not top among those. Do you have any sense for why Vought would have proceeded or honored this? I don’t know. Do you have any ideas why?
Tyler Creighton
I don’t really, I haven’t really seen any theories put out there. He obviously didn’t do it happily. He made it very clear that he wouldn’t have done this, if he was able to act on his own accord.
Billy Saas
Well, I’ll say kudos to Russ Vought in this one instance. Compliance. Do more. He could do more.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. Doing the bare minimum.
Billy Saas
I wanted to maybe return to the point that you mentioned, you’re here as a member of the union. The CFPB is not even 20 years old, but the union that y’all are a part of now, chapter 335, has been around for at least 100 years.
It’s associated with the Treasury. Could you talk just a bit about the union and maybe, by way of wrapping up, give our listeners some sense of what we might or what they might be able to do, and to support the union’s efforts.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. I won’t be able to speak to the 100 year history of the union.
Billy Saas
Understandable. Yeah.
Tyler Creighton
A bit beyond my knowledge, but we’re a local chapter, 335, of the National Treasurer Employees Union, which represents employees at a number of different agencies across the federal government. As I was saying before, I came to the bureau in 2022. So, I don’t have personal experience with the union’s early days, but as I understand, it was formed towards the end of 2012.
So a little over a year into the existence of the bureau and the history between 2012 and 2020, I don’t get the sense that there was like a ton of agitation going on. You know, it was helpful for workers, but has really kind of transformed, I think once Covid was like dramatically changing workplace norms for the federal government, but also for workers in every sector of the economy.
There were a lot of open questions like, “what are the expectations around work from home?” Making sure that people had correct set-ups at their home offices as they had to quarantine and such. I think there’s just been a lot of good organizing and build-up since then. So there was a lot of work being done.
This is kind of the tail end of when I’m coming in. So again, I’m speaking primarily from reports from other people, not my own personal experience on this, but, after Covid, as with all companies, it was like, “so what are the rules around working going to be as we kind of get back to a quasi-normal life?”
There was a lot of union organizing around the contract around remote and work from home policies and all that. I think that was a stepping stone to a bigger internal fight around pay and pay equity at the CFPB, which I think one reason why our union has such good strength is that we actually can negotiate on pay and benefits, which is, as I understand, not something that is universal across other federal agencies where their pay is set by the GS (General Schedule) scale and Congress. Our pay is not. It says something to the effect of, “we will be paid in comparable levels to people at the Federal Reserve,” which also has its own payment structure. Despite that language, our pay scale had not changed since the founding of the bureau. Meanwhile, the Fed’s pay scale kept going up.
There was this increasing disparity between the workers at the Fed and the workers at the CFPB, even though the statute said that we should be paid at a comparable level. There was a very big campaign spurred by the union that was very galvanizing for people around rectifying that issue.
Updating the pay scale to bring us closer in line. We didn’t get as far as we were intending, but closer in line to what the pay scale at the fed is, and also to help decrease disparities among similarly situated employees at the CFPB, where there were just these kind of arbitrary pay differences between people who had very similar experiences or had very similar responsibilities.
It was coming out of that that I think just set the union up very well. There were structures in place like good leadership and trust among workers that, when all of this most recent mess started in 2025, we kind of had some communications infrastructure in place to quickly gather intel about what the heck is going on at the CFPB and get in touch with appropriate outside counsel, get them the intel that all the workers are providing and then also get out into the streets and have mechanisms for getting information back out to the workers. Those kinds of early internal organizing efforts, I think, really set us up, even though the current fight is so radically different. There’s also been a lot of bumps in the road as we’ve tried to turn a union infrastructure that was mostly focused on applying pressure to our internal leaders who had their own interests, but at least were listening and receptive and we could sit at the same table with them, to, now, really focusing outwardly because our current leadership doesn’t care about the work life is like. I’ve been trying to get other people outside of the bureau to understand what’s going on and why this fight is important.
But I think it’s been pretty impressive. And I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that if the union didn’t exist in the way that it did in February 2025, that we wouldn’t be having this conversation about what the future of the CFPB is going to be. The future remains very uncertain, but it’s still here.
Every day that it continues, it increases the odds that it will continue to exist in the future. I give a lot of props and kudos to the leadership of our chapter to really inspire people. We had pretty good membership going into this.
Just in terms of the percentage of workers who are in the bargaining unit who actually pay membership dues and are considered members of the union, but it just went through the roof, like everybody joined. We’ve opened the merch shop. That’s a very, very long winded response to your question, but in terms of one way that you could support and get involved is we have a merch shop which has some great sweatshirts, hats, shirts, that I see all the time on people that are not from the CFPB. All that money goes to support the union in various ways. In the past, we had used it as resources for employees who had been fired and then don’t have income and were facing other kinds of hardships. So, that’s definitely one way to support the group.
As I mentioned earlier, we are advocating in Congress to increase our funding, cut back to where it was prior to the big beautiful bill, which decreased it. And then I think, most importantly, we got to get Russ Vought out. You know, he’s been terrible at the CFPB and he’s been terrible across the whole government as the head of OMB (Office of Management and Budget). So, you know, we’re continuing to beat the drum for impeaching him.
Scott Ferguson
What would be the legal grounds for impeaching him?
Tyler Creighton
The legal grounds? Well, remind me what the Constitution says about…I should know this as the attorney on the call, but he did the bare minimum by requesting funds back in January. But, you know, for the past year, he’s just been blowing through every legal safeguard around, like, around how you treat workers and firing them and withholding money that had been appropriated by Congress. I think there’s plenty of grounds to say that he’s been derelict in his duties.
Scott Ferguson
For sure. You know, I think one of the biggest revelations for me that’s come out of this conversation is, I became aware of the union and appreciating the work of the union, but not really knowing the extent of it. I don’t think I had a strong sense, and I certainly didn’t know anything about the history of the union, but I didn’t have a sense of the way that union organizing and infrastructure and activity has been constitutive for the survival of this agency.
That’s really inspiring to hear. Maybe sometimes we hear these stories like, “well, you know, one judge made a decision and it’s either good or bad or some crisis happened and people responded,” but I really appreciate this backstory too. It’s really great to hear that y’all were organizing around actually different issues, right?
Like, you were building capacity for a crisis that you didn’t even know was coming, but because you had built this capacity and taken on at least two major problems, when this major, major crisis hit, you were ready. That’s just such an inspiring story and lesson.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I shouldn’t forget to say that obviously other people have been involved in this outside of the union, which has been very integral. The legal counsel that NTAU (National Treasury Employee Union) retained for this case has been just like some of the best attorneys work I’ve seen.
So, you know, yes, the union’s been very integral in getting the information and doing the outside organizing and getting the message out. But inside the courtroom, our attorneys have been absolutely great. There’s been a number of other advocacy groups, whether it’s the Student Borrower Protection Center or NCLC (National Consumer Law Center) or Public Citizen who have also been involved in the litigation in various ways and then also activating their own members and doing public education around the bureau as well.
So we are not, by any means, the only folks that have been important in this fight. But, I do think it has been a very integral piece of the story and as you’re saying, kind of hidden, I think, in terms of the role that the union has played.
Billy Saas
We’re going to be sure to include a link to the union page and then also to the union merch shop. And speaking of that, I brought up a window here, and I’m going to do something I don’t think we’ve done in any show so far, but your merch is so great that I want to share it and talk about it. This Skully 335 hoodie. Yeah. Tremendous. No artist is credited, but listeners, I would encourage you to go check it out. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get one here as soon as the calls are over. But you have it.
We have some pretty provocative imagery. Can you talk to us about this, to have any context for us?
Tyler Creighton
I’m, unfortunately, the wrong person to answer this question, because I really was not involved in it, in any way. But the folks that were. Yeah, I don’t know where they came up with the art and who did it. We honestly should make that public on the site, but yeah, it’s not what you’re going to expect from the union merch stuff.
You’re talking about the Skully hoodie, and I don’t know if it’s this specific one, I think there’s a couple of different versions, but my father-in-law has one. He lives in a town up in rural Maine and there’s weekly actions on the bridge over the water in Maine where people gather to protest whatever insanity Trump is up to that week. He’s just wearing his skully sweater out on the bridge with all of the other folks in Maine. So, yeah, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. There may have been more and some of it has been dropped over the times, but there’s also all just a lot of like inside joke type stuff that, if you were following the litigation closely at the time when we were getting all of these revelations about what was going on behind the scenes in these emails and such, there’s a lot of, good content around that as well.
Scott Ferguson
So, I saw a “Fed Up” shirt. Is that actually connected to the organization “Fed Up”, or is that just a slogan that you all came up with on your own?
Tyler Creighton
Again, I don’t know. I’m the wrong person to answer that question. My assumption is that it’s a very common slogan that if you were to be in DC with all the other federal workers, you would see that as a common sign. My guess is that we have just done it because of that. But, there might be more of a backstory to it.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. Then something else again, we can keep this in or not, but like, I actually think it would be cool to include some of this merch in the art in our episode graphics, you know?
Billy Saas
Yeah. So in that case, we would definitely want to know who the artist is and see if they are down to share for the cover art’s collage work. But, anyway, we are having too much of a blast looking at all this stuff. It’s really great merch.
Tyler Creighton
Yeah, it’s too bad we didn’t do this before Christmas. It’s a great holiday gift. I know a lot of people that were giving it for holiday gifts.
Billy Saas
Yeah, well, there’s all sorts of great occasions. And, you know, you just want to support unions all year round, right?
Tyler Creighton
Exactly, exactly. So yeah. And it says here 100% of the proceeds go to the CFPB Solidarity Fund, which has, as I said, in the past, been used to help workers who’ve been illegally terminated and are facing various financial hardships because of that.
Billy Saas
Well, I just found the Skully 335 bomber jacket, and I’m just even more excited. This is a super, super high note to end on. Tyler, is there anything else you wanted to say before we say goodbye?
Tyler Creighton
No, I don’t think so. We covered a lot of ground today. I hope I didn’t ramble on too much and go into too many rabbit holes, but I appreciate it. I appreciate the time and the focus we could put on the union’s efforts and on keeping the CFPB alive. You know, Congress created the agency before for very specific reasons.
We went through a huge mortgage crisis. A lot of people lost their homes and it’s been doing great work since then, and there’s really no reason to get rid of it. So, we’ve kept it alive for the last year, but obviously we need people outside of the union to help us. So encourage you to get involved in whatever way that is, whether that’s buying some merch or calling Congress and telling them to make sure they don’t let Vought win and kill the agency.
Billy Saas
Excellent. Thank you so much, Tyler Creighton, for joining us on Money on the Left.
Tyler Creighton
Thank you.
* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.
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