Author: Money on the Left

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people–the majority of them women–serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides.” Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively “kills the golden goose” for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Khush Vachhrajani, welcome to Money on the Left.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

William Saas

Could you start by just telling us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the kind of questions that you’re asking in your most recent research, which you’re producing through your position at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research, or SAFAR, and sharing on your Substack?

Khush Vachhrajani

Sure. So, I’m from India. I’m from this city called Ahmedabad, which is in the western state of Gujarat. That’s also where the Prime Minister comes from, so, I think it has gone on the maps because of that. But it’s also the state where Gandhi was born and a very long part of his life after coming back from South Africa, when he started his journey in India, began from the state that I come from. I studied in a school that was sort of built on the foundation of some of the principles that Gandhi himself sort of taught us as a society. I currently work with a collective called the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research.

We are a group who’s just interested in making democracy work on a day to day basis for the most marginalized. We don’t see democracy as just an election-to-election arrangement, but also in terms of a person’s right to be heard, a person’s right to grievance, a person’s right to participate in the smallest decision making that affects the person or the society as a whole.

The work also is sort of anchored in some of these democratic principles. Apart from that, I love to read. I have been a follower of many of the progressive ideas that you all have sort of built over a period of time on Money on the Left and also have learned immensely from the writing, and the guests who have come here which has also sort of shaped a very core part of my own politics around money, around looking at monetary design. I enjoy music. I enjoy sports, and I have a lovely dog who’s going to turn five years old this year, and her name is Estelle. And that’s it. That’s more or less about me.

Scott Ferguson

That’s great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of your experience? You also studied in the United States and worked in the United States for a little bit.

Khush Vachhrajani

I did, so I did my master’s in public affairs. In the US, I was at Brown University in 2019 and 20. So my education was over when the pandemic sort of kicked in. During my time in the US, I also spent three months working in Houston, in the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities, which was an initiative largely to identify and then work towards supporting under-resourced and historically underrepresented communities in Houston. My task was to sort of look at the habitability question in one of those communities called Gulfton, where I learned a lot around some of the challenges that the United States also face in terms of the politics of, at times, immigration, challenges around creating a safer environment for many of the people who come to the United States with a lot of ambition or aspirations, and sometimes also out of desperation.

So, I had a great time working with the mayor’s office and also sort of learnt a great deal about what are some of the day-to-days of the immigrants who live in Houston and how a mayor could support them through that administration. So, yeah. Before that, I was also sort of engaged in working with governments and civil society in India.

My education built on my lived experiences in India and sharpened my imagination, I would say, as well as my ability to contribute to some of these things that sort of affect the lives of people.

Scott Ferguson

What occasions this conversation today is the publication of an article that you wrote titled “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It Hides,” and it was published in a publication called The Wire. It’s essentially criticizing and diagnosing the radical curtailment and maybe even demise of this public works program that’s been around for decades, since the 90s, I believe, in India.

It’s a terrible situation, but we found that your analysis and your framing of the argument to be really thorough and quite inspiring, despite the fact that it’s such a tragic situation, precisely because you frame these politics as a politics of not just money, but monetary design.

So I don’t know where you’d like to start. We could potentially start by talking about the nature of this program. Some people who listen to this show might be aware of this program, but, probably a lot aren’t. So maybe we can just start with, where did this program come from? Where did it arise? Maybe the happy part of the story before we get to its dismantling, very recently.

Khush Vachhrajani

Right. The more hopeful part, I would say. These state backed public employment programs have been around in different parts of India since the 80s and the 90s, largely framed around Social Security for rural workers in absence of decent agricultural work, but more so as a protection against famine or any sort of climate crisis which might affect the agricultural work itself.

So whenever there was absence of work due to these kinds of scenarios, the government would come in and they would focus on largely rural public works, which can be done through manual workers. Against that kind of work, they would provide them wages for sustenance. So these kinds of programs have been around in India since the 80s and 90s in some parts.

And the experiences of those programs became a backbone for a broader advocacy in India, especially after the 1990s, where India sort of liberalized, opened up its economy, adopted the neoliberal, market-based framework in the economy, which brought in a lot of resources, finances and money to a very, very small section of society in a sense.

But the precarity in rural areas amongst workers, especially manual workers, agricultural workers, construction workers, deepened over the entire decade. So in the late 90s and early 2000s, the experiences of these public works programs in other parts of India sort of became a central piece of argument that India needs a federal job guarantee kind of a framework.

It was also sort of demanded or was framed as a program, or a demand, as a state’s obligation to its people. It was articulated as people’s right to work within the constitutional framework. It was framed as a sort of politics of money that the people are deeply interested in and which sort of breaks away from the neoliberal framework that the state was pushing, in a sense.

So, in 2005, after the advocacy of about 7 to 8 years, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came about. So MGNREGA is what it is called, in a shorter sense, or sometimes in India, we also call it NREGA. So, NREGA was sort of conceptualized with this vision that every single person who wants to work can get work under this program.

There will be wage parity amongst men and women. Again, it was a breakthrough at that time. The government sort of decided a particular floor at which people are to be paid and that the floor will be revised every year based on inflation. So it’s sort of created a progressive framework which was rooted in creating a public option for employment.

While it was demanded to be a program which is running throughout the year, the government sort of enacted this law where each household will get work for up to 100 days a year. So instead of every person, it was like one person per household for 100 days. And, in terms of its design, if there are four people in a household who are above 18 – the working age – let’s say, for example, then all four people would be a part of, what was called, a job card.

Amongst those 100 people, anybody could come out and work. So it was again like 100 days per household. That’s how the program was shaped. In addition to creating this public employment option, it also created, as I said, a wage floor which was equal for men and women.

It also sort of provided 10 rights to the workers themselves; to each and every one of them will have a job card, they can go and demand work at any time, they will get work within five kilometers of their radius, they will get certain facilities at the worksite, they will get paid within 15 days of completing work, they will have the power to audit the kind of work that is happening around them (etc.). It was a very, very progressive legislation which was fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles for almost a decade. So that was basically the foundation of how the law came about. When it was passed in the parliament in 2005, it was passed unanimously, across all party lines, across all different political ideologies.

It was passed with a very emphatic belief that this is creating a right to livelihood or at least a path for people to claim the right to livelihood, but also with sort of an understanding that within the new liberal economic framework, this is the least a country could do for its people, which is sort of a public option at a particular rate for just 100 days a year.

So that has always been there and that is also something that I address in my article that this has never really been a revolutionary program the way that we all want, but it was still fundamental as a cornerstone in people’s politics in India.

Scott Ferguson

Was it restricted to rural areas or did it also operate in urban areas?

Khush Vachhrajani

It was restricted to rural areas, which would be about almost 70% of India. So it’s still pretty universal in that sense. What emerged after all these years of NREGA being operationalized is also that, during Covid, there were several urban employment guarantee programs, which were designed and launched in urban areas as well by different state governments.

In 2023, my neighboring state, Rajasthan, enacted an urban employment guarantee law itself, which mandated 125 days of urban employment on very similar lines of NREGA . So that is also one of the contributions, which I don’t really talk about in the article that has come out, but this is definitely something that I’m writing in my next piece reflecting on these kinds of effects that NREGA has had in the political imagination of Indian society as well.

Scott Ferguson

What’s your sense of the kind of work that has gone on in the auspices of this program, that I would assume is pretty various? There’s not just one type of employment. Do you have a sense of the variety of work?

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. So another beautiful part of the design of the law, since it was fought for by a people’s movement and struggle which sort of informed the overall design, every local unit in India – that local unit in rural areas is called a Gram Panchayat, you can also sort of understand that it’s GP – every GP has to first think about all kinds of work that they can do under NREGA.

So it is not a top down design. It sort of stems from the most decentralized local unit, and each Gram Panchayat is supposed to create, what we call as basket of works, at least 2.5 times the demand that may exist in the local area. So they have to make sure that they are able to imagine and they’re able to create enough work in their area so that they are able to meet demands up to two and a half times, which is quite great. The works that we’ve seen in India has varied a lot also because of the kind of geographies that have been we have seen in the northeastern part of India, which is very, very remote, with very deep forests and hills where this program has been used to build pathways for people living in the valleys to come up on the main road and get connected to the public transportation system in the southern part of India or even in the western part of India where the droughts are very, very common. We’ve seen this program creating step wells in villages, which is sort of a local traditional mechanism of storing rainwater. In the northern part of India, there are mountains in the Himalayas which are prone to landslides. We have seen this program creating a more ecologically sound infrastructure that is needed for the local community to not only commute, but also to sort of earn a livelihood.

Another aspect of the program has also been that different kinds of people can access the program. So if, let’s say, I’m a person with a disability, then the program design allows me to work either in my own backyard or in my house, and it will be counted under the NREGA. If I come from an historically marginalized community, which in India we call scheduled tribes and, the scheduled castes (Dalits).

So if I come from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, I can work up to 200 days. Sorry, actually, 150 days in a year. If I am a person with disabilities, I can work up to 200 days a year. So all these progressive thoughts of who’s working, where they are working, and who is sort of making claims, is rooted in the design of the program.

There is enough documentation, a lot of writing, and several documentaries which have also been able to record the range of work that NREGA has been able to create. Even in the program design, they are all called assets. The NREGA has been building assets and not just work because these are all rural social infrastructure which is aiding the economic, political, social lives of people.

It’s been quite extraordinary in my experience, I have seen this operate in multiple geographies, multiple parts of India. I have also worked at a NREGA site during my experience in Rajasthan. These are all manual works. Imagine they are creating a small canal to make sure that the water flows smoothly between farms sometimes. In popular opinion writing, all these works are sort of termed as low skill works. Okay, but anybody who has worked in NREGA would be able to say  how highly skilled these works are. It’s not easy to both design and plan and then dig a stepwell. It’s not easy to build roads. 

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know how to do that.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly, exactly. Right. All these works are sort of termed as low skill, manual works, but I always term them as manual works which are building social, political, economic, architecture in many of these villages.

William Saas

So I don’t know if you’ve attended any meetings of the GP’s, or if they are documented in these documentaries, which I am absolutely excited to take a look at later, but do you have a sense for what those meetings are like? It strikes me that they’re probably more than just getting together and writing down a list of tasks to complete, but might end up being more expressive of community values and, as you say, social relations at the same time as they are about identifying work to do. Can you just provide any kind of overall broad or personal description of what goes on at these things?

00;21;59;12 – 00;22;26;18

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. These meetings, at the GP levels, are called Gram Sabha, which are basically convenings at the village level, in translation, and all the decisions which pertain to the GP or the village or the local unit are supposed to be taken only in Gram Sabha.

So it is like a general body of all the voting members of a GP. Right. From deciding what kind of work that needs to be done to the kind of money that will be needed to do this work, which, in the program, is called the Labor Budget. It is also developed in these Gram Sabha. To understand how these Gram Sabha work, and the picture that I’m going to sort of share is also how a Gram Sabha is really well organized, right, or is very well planned because like all other democratic functions, it is also a function of how active the voter is, how much power are they exercising as citizens of the Gram Sabha. There will always be vested interests. There will always be attempts toward the participation of people. But in some of these most thriving Gram Sabha that I have seen or many of us have seen, it takes place in layers.

First and foremost, there is a caste layer in India. India is a very deeply caste society, where the caste hierarchies govern many of these social relations, power struggles, control over resources and MGNREGA plans for these kinds of things. So if, let’s say, a well has to be built or a tree plantation has to be done to develop a garden, for example, which area would it take place in the village? Which are the communities that would benefit out of it? All these conversations are quite central to these discussions in Gram Sabha. So the first layer that these Gram Sabha try to facilitate, again these Gram Sabha, which are organized with an intent to make many of these things work, is to unpack what are the needs of different groups and communities within that village, wherever they are located and situated in terms of infrastructure.

The second layer that it unpacks is the layer of gender. I have said in my article that more than 50% of these workers are women workers. They are the ones who are in the villages. They are raising kids. They’re taking care of elderly parents. They are taking care of the farmlands. They are the ones who have not really migrated out of the villages to urban areas for work. So, the gender layers are very important in these kinds of conversations and the kind of infrastructure that women might need. Most of the time, the way Indian villages are organized is the responsibility of fetching water.

If I do not have access to piped drinking water or water for domestic chores, it falls on women. So where a well will be built or where the location or the site of a step well or even a canal depends on how women participate in these Gram Sabha. And then the third very, very critical layer comes as to what are the social needs of a community?

Does a school need, let’s say, a toilet or a playground or, does a hospital require a boundary wall sometimes, or a library requires a bit of renovation or a person wants to build, let’s say, a cowshed, or a small poultry kind of a mechanism to earn a livelihood. So these are the conversations that also take place in Gram Sabha and based on all these engagements the basket of work is developed. Based on the basket of work, then the Legal Budget is prepared. How much money will be required in the form of wages to execute the work? What will be the material cost?

How much of this material would we need to build all the assets under the NREGA for that year. So that is how these Gram Sabha sort of function and, again, we have also seen these Gram Sabha as places for deep contestation amongst the community sometimes. 

So in India, the person who’s elected and who’s the chair of the Gram Sabha is called Sarpanch, who is like the elected mayor of the GP. Mayor equivalent for a rural area. So it will also depend on the community where the Sarpanch comes from or if the Sarpanch is a woman or a man, if the Sarpanch is from the Dalit or the scheduled caste community, or if a Sarpanch is a graduate. All these things will sort of factor in how that Gram Sabha is being governed.

Then, in many areas where we have seen really transformational work happening or these really productive assets for people are being developed, there is also a role that the state has played in facilitating it. We have seen some really progressive bureaucrats, progressive governments, state governments especially facilitate these conversations in terms of providing more support to the village in bureaucratic functionaries, or on the role that they can play in facilitating this dialog between the elected members of the government and the general body, what are the kind of insights that they can provide, in terms of what might benefit the village in the long run vis a vis short term? So all these sort of permutations and combinations go into creating the basket of works which are then required for the Panchayats to submit under the NREGA program.

Scott Ferguson

So, we wouldn’t want to overly romanticize this program, because as you said, it’s, you know, in the context of a neoliberal era, it’s sort of the least that can be done. Yes. At the same time, I think it’s worth drawing out some of the radical potential here. I mean, I feel like you’re already talking about it, but I just kind of want to bring more meta language to it.

So we’ve got the context and the geopolitical context is neoliberalization. I mean, there’s lots of ways of describing what neoliberalization even means in the first place, but certainly a market ordered society where non-democratic, private allocation, is supposed to be the best, the most efficient, etc., etc..

The market is supposed to perform certain kinds of mechanisms that are dada dada da, and so on. All these basic questions about “who we are as a people,” “how do we organize and cooperate,” “how do we organize our labor,” “what is the mode of production,” “are there multiple modes of production,” “how should we go about this in the first place,” are just off the table. That’s the power of the neoliberal paradigm as a kind of, you know, radicalized reboot of the liberal paradigm. It seems like the jobs program in India really deeply contests that paradigm and offers an alternative, beginning not just with the kind of the democratic impulses in these local GP organizations and meetings, but also the way that these basic questions are being reposed from the bottom up once again. I mean, not just bottom up in terms of democratic participation, but bottom up ontological, conceptually. I think, so often neoliberal market logic presumes that if there are needs, the market meets them. And if the market isn’t meeting the need, it’s not a real need.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly.

Scott Ferguson

This is not new to anybody who’s familiar with any of the writings about public works programs and job guarantees. It’s not news to anybody who follows Modern Monetary Theory. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth really underscoring the way that this program just poses the question of: who are we to one another? What do we owe one another? How are we going to participate? And what are the needs of our community that are not de facto reduced to a reified neoliberal market?  I still teach Karl Marx all the time, for as many issues I have with Marx’s work nowadays, one of the fundamental questions he’s posing and what his critique of the alienation of labor is all about is not just, “oh, I’ve made something and my product has been yanked away from me by the owners of production,” but the very democratic question of how do we organize our labor together as a community? How do we even do that in the first place? And what should we be doing together? It seems like, again, not romanticizing it, but as an impulse this program has potential to pose that question in a very deep way.

00;33;14;15 – 00;34;06;23

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. There was no better way of putting it than what you’ve already done, Scott, really. The program was in action for the last two decades and even a little bit before that, but in the last two decades, we have seen so many GPs, Panchayats, really understanding the democratic power that they have as a unit in the larger schemes of affair. Progressive, elected leaders of these Panchayats would make sure that their claim to democratic money is heightened and it is sort of demanded for. Even from civil society and progressive groups, they have sort of latched onto this program to unionize some of these workers who have been working under NREGA and not just workers, but also, there is a concept of a “mate”, the mate is basically a friend who’s just supposed to sort of supervise a work site so we can also call them a work site supervisor.

So there have been civil society groups and unions to sort of unionize these workers and the mate to demand for full implementation of the program in the community, to demand expansion of the basket of works in the community, to sort of innovate at times as to the kind of infrastructure and assets that can be built, and their relationship with the village itself. Many of these really macro imaginations and philosophies come together in a program like this in a very real sense. One thing that I also mentioned in my writing is how it shapes the relationship between a landlord or a contractor and the workers themselves. In absence of a program like this, my power to negotiate wages is very, very limited.

And in the Indian context, it has been documented quite well that before this program was introduced in the villages, irrespective of how good or bad it was being implemented in the village, the fact that this design existed automatically pushed rural wages a lot. It really shifted the conversation from working at almost slave wages to working at dignified wages.

If, let’s say, the rural wage is set at 100 for now, the shift that we saw in the earlier years was not a 101 or 105. It was huge. It was 150, 200 at times. So it shifted, and in the one, it also sort of set what workers were actually losing by this program not being in existence.

We have seen that throughout two decades, even in Panchayats, where this program has not really worked because of many reasons. With the government in power that we have today in India, the last 5 to 6 years have been really, really difficult. Actually, the last whole decade has been really difficult for this program. There have been budget cuts. There has been public mockery by the Prime Minister inside the parliament about this program, despite all the structural challenges, the loss of wages has not come down. The faith that people have on the ground about the potential that this program could have in their lives and in their environment has not really gone anywhere.

Yes, there has been disappointment that the program has not been implemented, but we saw it in Covid that when state governments really pushed from their sides to implement these programs, people were coming out demanding for work. People were coming out to think about the kind of infrastructure that they need during pandemic and after.

What you also articulated so well, and this is something that I’ve tried to even sort of hint at in my article and I’m not really sure if I have been successful at it, but political imagination of a common person, and most times, a woman living in a village in India, really changed, as to what is possible in their lives.

The women workers, even today, are coming together protesting against repeal of NREGA from all different parts of India. Not because they were very happy with this framework and they were all hunky-dory. But it is the faith in the design that this is their democratic right, this is their claim to democratic money, and it is their faith that if one day I have an equal power to operate in this economy, which otherwise is extremely unfair to me.

That, I feel, has been the crux of the last two decades of NREGA. With all its ebbs and flows, the people, every time when they were offered an imagination of a progressive, public, employment program or a job guarantee kind of a program, people latched on to it and they really made sure that it works, wherever it works.

00;39;48;07 – 00;40;32;01

William Saas

Just want to give us a pass for a bit of romanticization. I want to underscore and emphasize a bit more. The NREGA seems like a program out of time in a couple of ways. One is that it’s under appeal now, that’s the obvious one. But “out of time” in terms of the two decades, as you just described, are periods noted for their intensification of neoliberal logics rather than their lessening. As I’m hearing you narrate and reading your work, it becomes, I think, obvious why and from what trajectories this program would be challenged and undermined, but that it has taken so long to get there is remarkable and I think a testament to the people who make up the NREGA projects, that do the baskets of work. Before we get to the repeal, I feel like we’re almost there, but living in the romance just a little bit longer. Was there any kind of more cultural work, artistic work commissioned or called for in these meetings and identified in the baskets of work? So, public art, public music?

Khush Vachhrajani

Fantastic question and not really, but I’m very glad that this has come up. And a colleague of mine who might listen to this podcast would be really happy to listen to this question as he comes from a community… 

William Saas

What’s his name, let’s shout him out.

00;41;28;24 – 00;42;02;03

Khush Vachhrajani

Oh, yeah. His name is Paras, Paras Banjara. He comes from the community that traditionally has been the nomadic tribes in India. His whole identity is also of a cultural activist among many of the other hats that he wears. But, unfortunately, in this regard, the ambit of works are limited to manual works and not really art cultural in that sense.

But in 2022, if I am getting the year right, I think it was around 2022 or 2023 again, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic in India, which was disastrous for many communities economically, and the communities were already recovering from a demonetization experience in 2016 that really terribly implemented tax reforms in 2017, which was then followed by a pandemic. So there was this long period of real economic distress. So Paras, along with some of the other friends in, again, the state of Rajasthan, who are all sort of cultural activists and who look at culture as commons, work with local traditional artisans who specialize in folk music and different folk instruments.

They advocated for a very similar public employment program, 100 days for Rural Artisans in Rajasthan. It was centered around folk musicians, and the design was again very, very similar, where it would provide a 100 day wage employment to all these rural artisans, wherever they are. The basket of works were kept very, very wide, but it ranged from teaching in a school to performing a government function or to sort of participate in these Gram Sabha as cultural artists and entertaining people and talking to people about their art forms. It was quite a broad ambit. Implementation of that program was very, very haphazard. But the imagination was there, and it was something that has been fought for by Paras and some of these groups for a very long time. These are all traditional art forms and, really very, very strong and almost culturally extinct practices of folk music that stem from years and years – and in my understanding – centuries of traveling around the world as gypsies or as nomadic tribes from which they’ve picked up all these different art forms and music, and they’ve sort of made it more Indian. In one of the conversations on culture as commons, we saw many of these come together to perform a very different version of a bagpipe, a very different version of drums, a very different version of a string based instrument in that sense.

So that imagination has been tried. Not very successful, but the state did try to push for something like that. I remember, I think, in the US there was something just after the Second World War, tried in Washington state, if I’m not wrong, a public arts program. I think it was one of those states in the US. So it just tried.

Scott Ferguson

So I have a question, which I guess, in my mind, both comes from a place of ignorance and insight. So I want to ask about the so-called informal economy in India, which I know nothing about. All I know is that people tell me that it’s a large informal economy and by this I take to mean that it is not being directly organized by the rupee.

My ignorance is, I just don’t know how this works because I don’t study it. I don’t live there. The maybe slightly more insightful part of this is the Money on the Left presumption in our analysis is that there’s no ultimate outside or absolute inside and outside between a formal monetary economy and what might lie beyond that. In fact, what we call informal economies themselves have their own forms of language and accounting and responsibility and capacitations.

We, at Money on the Left, tend to try to blur the distinction between the so-called formal and the so-called informal. But I’m wondering if A) is anything I’m saying just off, and B) especially since the program was not year round or if it worked year round, but for only 100 days, so it wasn’t full time, right? I guess that’s what I’m looking for. It, of course, must have interacted in complex ways with the so-called informal economy. Do you have any sense of how this played out?

00;47;30;23 – 00;47;57;00

Khush Vachhrajani

A limited sense. I would try and sort of put out what I feel, and my understanding and I think the more general understanding in India about an informal economy also sort of stems from the fact that more than 90% of the Indian workforce is engaged in informal work. And what we mean by that is also that that work is not on any contract.

They don’t really have an employer of any kind. There is no fixed salary that is credited to their account by the end of the week or the month. There is no Social Security and it’s almost always a daily wage earning. So if I am a construction worker in a city, I would just go stand in, what we call a “Labour Chowk”, or, let’s say, a corner in a neighborhood where all these workers would come, let’s say, around seven in the morning, eight in the morning, and they would be picked up by a contractor to, let’s say, fix somebodies house for the day and that would be their job, and they would earn from the day. The second day would be something new, a new task, with a new contractor, a new place.

Scott Ferguson

But they’d be paid in rupees?

00;48;50;23 – 00;49;24;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes. They will be paid in rupees. Most of these people would earn in cash, physical cash. There have been several policy decisions which have tried to get many of these workers to be a part of the formal banking systems, largely through direct payments to their accounts. But still a lot of the Indian informal workforce earns in physical cash.

That’s also because that’s how they spend on a day to day basis, with the emergence of fintech and again, a very, very deep neoliberal financialization of banking itself, where they are charged every time they take out money from the ATM, there is no way that they can afford to lose any more than sort of what they’re getting, which is also really, really very low.

So these are the kind of people that we generally imagine as informal workers and in rural areas, where the NREGA was implemented. Actually it is still implemented till March 31st. The informal economy would be implemented in multiple ways. There is, one, direct agricultural labor. So I could be a farmer but with a very, very small landholding.

So it would not be enough for me to sustain. So along with working on my own farm, I would also be working in somebody else’s farm on an hourly basis or task basis or a day to day basis and I would sort of get money based on that. Or I would be a landless farmer and I’m working as a laborer, either as a contractual laborer with a farmer and then I would be employed for the entire season. Sometimes it is also out of precarity of different kinds where I could be a landholding farmer sustaining myself, but, for any reason, my crop got destroyed or there was a drought and I have loans on me, so I’m not able to pay off those debts. So, I am forced to work as a local. A lot of rural work is also construction. So again, it’s like what I describe for a city, it is  very similar to what would also exist in a rural area, where I could go to a worksite in the morning, and I could work from morning to evening doing manual work, and I would be paid for that.

These are the kinds of ways in which the informal economy is sort of organized in villages. What NREGA did was just push how the engagement with the contractor would be. That contractor could be a person who is working in the worksite, or the contractor could be a farmer themselves or the landlord at times, in just helping them negotiate at what price the manual work would be offered.

Scott Ferguson

So let’s talk about the devastation of this program. I mean, I’m assuming there were reactionary forces who wanted to end it the whole time. I’m assuming that it gained traction, but how did this all play out?

00;52;22;10 – 00;52;48;28

Khush Vachhrajani

Yeah, the trauma, the trauma. So, as I said, when the current BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government came in power in 2014, the prime minister, in his very first speech in the parliament, made a huge public mockery of NREGA by saying it’s a program where there is no pothole, so people first would dig that pothole and then they would fill that pothole. It’s that kind of a program that has been running and, he also said that he would make sure that this program sort of survives long enough for people to remember how big a joke this has been in the Indian economy. That was sort of a proclamation of where the public policy would be geared towards, in one sense. The program, however, was not killed directly through a new law, like what we’ve seen now, but it was sort of dismantled structurally through three means from 2014 to 2025, when they got a new law in itself. It’s also quite interesting because to many of us, who have been looking at how the repeal came about, it caught us by surprise along with the swiftness with which it was done. And, even the parliamentary procedures around this new law was quite something for us to see. But, our analysis and understanding has been that over the last 11 years, the program has been dismantled slowly to a level where people, many of these Panchayats, have not really seen works opening for three or four seasons now.

So for them, the program has always been dead. So this new program coming in makes very little impact on NREGA. But coming back to how I think it was dismantled over the first 11 years were three ways. 1) A very, very big focus on introducing very modern digital technology infrastructure in a reality where there is no phone connection or there is no internet connection. They introduce things like, digital identity based payments. India has one of the largest biometric programs called Aadhaar. They made sure that every single worker’s bank account is linked to this digital ID card, which is called Aadhaar. It is just a biometric identity program, nothing else.

It was proclaimed as that. So each and every person is sort of tagged to this unique ID, and then the money would be transferred directly to their bank account instead of it first coming to the Panchayat, or the GP and then through the GP, then getting it in the form of cash. And it was sort of introduced as a means to curb corruption, reduce inefficiencies and to make the whole payment mechanism very transparent.

Again, there is an Indian reality that has been narrated ever since the Aadhaar was launched in 2008, there would be difficulties in matching names of people on one document to another document. There will be typing errors. There is not enough infrastructure on-ground to make sure that these things are rectified. Then it is forced, from top down, in a manner where if there is any error, my money would be stopped, then it’s a catastrophe. That is what happened. So when they introduced this, we call it ABPS, which is the Aadhaar Based Payment System, it led to many bank accounts where the money sort of never reached the worker because there was a problem with the name.

There was a name mismatch or there was a mismatch in the biometric. As I said, it’s a biometric program. So they have to go and make sure that they verify at the branch location in rural areas that they are the same people and any reasons that the biometric has failed. So that is another reason why, despite working, they would not get their money.

And thirdly, it also sort of created an architecture where we’ve seen cases where, like, I think in 2022 or 23, close to 60 to 70 million people were just not paid because of these kinds of inefficiencies. So this was one of the first things which was introduced. The second thing which was introduced then was a biometric based attendance system at worksites where every worker before beginning their work on a particular day would have to go in and make sure that they are at a geotagged worksite.

They would have to do the fingerprints and make sure they match what we called a “muster roll”, which is just like a list of all people who are going to work at the worksite. So basically this was a digital attendance mechanism date. The geolocation of the work site and the geolocation of that worker has to match to make sure that the worker is not sitting at the houses and getting paid for not doing the work.

All this sounds fantastic, but it is just not practical. There will be issues with geotagging and that is what we realized. The person who is doing the geotagging has, let’s say, geotagged the wrong work site. Workers have come to the right work site because they know in that area in the village where the work site is, and it would just not match. Or everything is okay, the work site is matched, it is geotagged correctly, the workers are at the correct site, but there is no internet, so they have to move 500m up and down. Then the moment they move, the work site goes beyond the geotag range. So, people would come to work, but they would not be able to start their work because the attendance is not marked.

So there are so many people who came to work, but they were just not able to work. And that also creates a huge disappointment and a disincentive for workers to make their way all the way to the work site.

Scott Ferguson

Real quick. A meta comment on what you’re saying here. In the States, we call this “death by a thousand cuts,” right? It was eroded from the inside before the big blow knocked it out. The main point I wanted to make here is that, it’s not just that the development and implementation and ongoing evolution of the program was a question of contestation over monetary design in both narrow and capacious senses of that term, but the counter forces, the reactionary forces, the contestation against the program was also a function of monetary design in multiple senses.

01;00;49;28 – 01;01;22;09

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. You have got it absolutely right, that it is a death by a thousand cuts. This is something that we also have spoken about and written about quite a lot. One of the most insidious ways in which the program was killed was also around the democratization of money where the union government stopped paying state governments their dues.

The way this program is organized is that all the wage payments, 100% of the wage payments, come from the union government, who is the monetary sovereign government. And for all the material costs which are involved in any public work, 75% come from the union government, 25% comes from the state government. That has been a design that has been agreed upon which has been ruling since 2005.

But over the last seven, eight, nine years, we’ve continuously seen wages being withheld. So imagine workers are working on the ground and they’re just not being paid and the pressure is being felt by the state government and the state government doesn’t have the kind of money that is required to pay these wages. So if the wages are withheld, workers are not going to come to work. At the same point in time there is a provision for what is called a social audit in NREGA, which is basically going beyond the financial audit, but giving power to the Gram Sabha – the fundamental unit that is responsible for running this program – to also monitor how the program is being implemented, considering all these different parameters around how people are working with these worksites, how their experiences have been. Now, social audit has been a mechanism which has been fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles to ensure that people have a right to monitor the implementation of this program.

It is not left to a third party or the government to dictate how the program is to be functioning. The way it has been designed is, 0.5% of NREGA’s annual expenditure is earmarked for social audits. So the money has also been kept aside in the monetary design of this program. Then, in order to facilitate the social audit, each state has to create these social audit units, which are supposed to be independent autonomous bodies and that 0.5% of state’s total expenditure would come to them. Then they would make sure that they go to a  Gram Sabha, they prepare a team from the  Gram Sabha to then audit what has been happening.

So this has been an inbuilt mechanism for transparency and accountability within NREGA, which has been weaponized against different state governments where they have been told that “we are not going to release money to you because social audit reports have been terrible,” without understanding that when a social audit report is bad or whether it is sort of unearthing corruption, unearthing misuse of money, the department that is supposed to act on those findings and fix those gaps is supposed to be the rural development department.

It is not supposed to be these social audit units whose job it is to figure out what is happening, no. So even their money will be withheld, so the social audit units are left to dry and the states are also not getting money. This is something that we have documented systematically through our work as well, that there have been social audit units who have not received their dues for five, six years.

There have been state governments who have not received the wages of the workers who have worked in the state governments for several years. There have been court battles. The state of West Bengal went to the High Court of the state. They won. They went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said that the government has to release the money.

But what I mean to say is, and this is something that also sometimes troubles me, that our understanding of what a monetarily sovereign government can do, this is actually a flip side of that. They’ve decided to not really provide that democratic money to the money users in their federal mechanisms. The state government was to compensate these autonomous independent units, they were supposed to be the checkers in the system in that sense.

All these things have been used systematically to kill the program when all these digital interventions that I spoke about earlier were also introduced under the name or under the guise of transparency and accountability. It was to say workers are not working at the worksite.

Hence we are sort of introducing this worksite monitoring mechanism. It is insane because there are more than 100 million workers across India who work at these worksites and India does not have the kind of technological sophistication, infrastructure, architecture to be able to facilitate any of these big tech interventions and these are also not just benign interventions thought to make the program work.

These are also data and a very strong market linked surveillance of testing certain hypotheses, like whether the biometric attendance system in general could work in a place like India with 100 million rural workers. They don’t want to introduce this system for rural workers. They want to introduce this for something else, but this is a proof of concept.

Can direct payments to bank accounts work and what are the kinds of complications? So how do we then design a structure for these high scale financial transactions which happen amongst the top 5% of Indian users today? India has something called UPI, Unified Payment Interface, which is this free and open source payments protocol for digital payments, which is sort of different from Venmo in that sense.

But this is also a kind of proof of concept for interventions like those which are deeply market linked, which are all financialization of finance. It’s been really terrible to see the kind of experimentations which have been done on these hundreds and millions of rural workers, whose daily earnings are peanuts even under a program like this.

What we heard last year was that they also want to do facial recognition technology through drones at these rural worksites. The amount of money that is being spent on these technological interventions vis-a-vis the amount of money that the simple rural or manual worker is earning, it is insane. It just doesn’t make sense in the traditional public policy cost benefit analysis framework.

It just doesn’t add up. Right? So whose interest it is serving, is something that I think has been fundamental to many of us. We’ve followed the evolution of these digital architectures that have been forced upon people where there is no Opt-Out option. If I demand that I want my wages in the form of physical cash, I just can’t.

It has to come to my bank account, right? This takes away the idea of a monetary design which is free, fair, and just, which is democratic in that sense. There is a little bit of a technicality to clarify.

So they’ve come up with this new law, which is called the VB GRAM G Law. It’s a very long, complicated, full form. So I’ll just cut it out and call it VB Gram G. So they, one, have legitimized all the digital technology architecture that they introduced to NREGA as part of law, which is crazy and which is scary and which is unacceptable by all means, because all these interventions, which they did earlier in the NREGA were just through circulars and guidelines, there was no legal legitimacy of any of these things. Now it has that. Second, it also has sort of passed the law but then not on-paper repealed NREGA.  There is confusion around whether both of these will coexist, not coexist and how it will sort of play out.

But in the new law, they’ll also sort of change the fiscal arrangement of the program. Instead of the Union government being responsible for 100% or wages, which is the majority of expenditure in the program, they’ve shifted that burden onto the states and they said that the entire expenditure will be borne by states and the Union government with the share of 60/40.

The state governments do not have that kind of money. There’s no way any of the state governments could actually shell out 40% of the expenditure. So it’s just impractical. There is no way this can be done. Another crucial aspect of the new law is that – earlier, as I said, the labor budgets or the budget for the program would emerge from bottom up through these discussions and deliberations in Gram Sabha and Gram Panchayat, which would feed into the state and then the Union government budget – now, they have said that the Union government arbitrarily determined based on “normative” parameters, how much the allocation for this program in the current state would be. What those normative parameters are, we don’t know. They’ve not really specified that.

Scott Ferguson

I just want to point out to the listeners that you put scare quotes around normative, when you said normative. You were not using it straightforwardly. 

01;12;26;01 – 01;13;01;02

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And anybody who reads the law multiple times, it would become more and more evident that some of these arrangements in the new law are insidious designs of killing federalism and sort of completely turning the monetary design upside down, making it extremely top down. As to why they would not specify what that normative allocation would be, they said that any state government or any local government, whatever program schemes they’re running on their own, can be merged with this new VB GRAM G law. There will be no consultation, no dialog with the state government on what they are okay with, what they are not okay with in terms of the arrangement or the normative allocation itself. If a state government wants to opt out of the mechanism, they either have to enact a law that is in line with the VB GRAM G law or better, or they completely let go of the money under the program. So even that 60% shared they can let go. 

One more thing, NREGA was a universal mandate. It was implemented universally across all GP’s. Anybody could ask for work anytime in the day. In the new law that they proposed, they have said that the Union government would notify the states and the districts in the sub-units where the program would be implemented. No consultation, no check-in, nothing with nothing.

It’s just like they will determine where all it will be implemented, and it’s also that they can change that each year. So there is a switch-on, switch-off clause. So today they can notify, let’s say there are five areas in XYZ states without consulting the XYZ states and putting the burden of spending 40% of that amount. Then next year they could very well be, “okay, XYZ States are done, no I’m going to move to ABC states. XYZ states are done and they have no power to really sort of claim the right of democratic money in that sense. So the way they have structured the new law is they will notify the area, they will notify the works, the state governments will have to spend 40% – there is no opting out of that – and I, as a union government, can notify, let’s say, all villages of a particular state, let’s say it’s an opposition ruled state, but normatively allocate only ₹1 to that state and say that, “okay, 60% will come through me, which is like 60 cents that would come from me, 40 cents you spend.”

Any expense that is over and above the normative allocation, the state has to spend. So now for all those villages where the Union government has notified work, the state will end up spending and there is no way it is implemented. So it is also to kill some of the politically opponent states financially, which is detrimental for the Indian economy.

It is not a matter of political preferences, but also the fiscal structure in the federal structure of the state itself.

Scott Ferguson

Well, you’ve begun to answer a question I had, but I’d like to pose it explicitly and have you contemplate it, which is: what you’re making clear, is that the new law didn’t end the program. It just crippled it. It created such new designs and strictures that it’s just now designed to fail.

But the question is, why didn’t they just get rid of it? Why didn’t they just pass a law that said, this is over?

01;17;10;20 – 01;17;35;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Because the political stakes are very high, I would say. What I was also describing earlier, even in areas where it has not been functioning or it has not been doing very well, or the democratically making has not really been at par with many of the other high performing states. The sentiment and the significance of the program has always been there.

To take away that absolute final thread that people are hanging on to in a very deeply unequal neoliberal economic framework would be a bit too much. It would be something that would be politically unacceptable and that is my reading. I could be partially wrong in this, but the reason why I feel that this is one of the major reasons is because they’ve got this new law with full intention to repeal NREGA.

The intention is not to change its nature. The intention is to repeal it, but they also want to repeal it in a gradual manner. So in the Union Budget, which was announced a couple of weeks back, we had allocated a little money for the new law as well as they have allocated some money for NREGA. Our understanding is that the money that is mandated is also for some of the spending expenditure under NREGA, but they’ve not really passed legislation in the Parliament saying that NREGA is over now and from April 1st, this new law begins. April 1st is the start of the financial year, so we have April 1st till March 31st. They’ve not yet made that clear. So our understanding is that they’re going to go along with both these laws sort of simultaneously existing while keeping state governments in limbo, because the state governments have no idea what are the notified areas in their states.

They don’t know the normative allocation. They don’t know how much they are supposed to budget from their own limited resources. So they’re going to continue that for a little while. And maybe in 6 to 8 months, then completely phased out NREGA. They would then implement the VB GRAM G Act, which practically would destroy fiscal federalism in India because there is no state government that is anyway close to even implementing a program like that. The amount of financial burden that the state governments would have is just enormous. In our understanding of monetary operation and how sort of public money works, it’s just not possible that the state governments are able to deliver on anything like this even remotely.

William Saas

The critical part of the story that you’re articulating is the big tech intervention, as you put it.

And this might be one place where we can learn the kind of cutting edge of the neoliberal playbook. These biometric systems, do you know if they’re intellectual property of private firms that have been licensed by the Indian government? Or are these state run software that are monitoring these work sites and doing precisely the opposite of what they’re supposed to do on the tin, which is to make things more efficient. Of course, they’re breaking these work sites.

01;22;28;24 – 01;23;13;07

Khush Vachhrajani

I think it’s a mix of both.That is why the Indian state has really been an interesting case study. How they’ve created a market of monetizable data of almost each individual or each citizen of India.The way Big Tech is functioning at the moment in a program like NREGA is private corporations working with the the Union government in developing and designing these software, they’re housed within the ministry of IT or what we call as National Informatics Centers as well. NIC, whose task was the digitalization age of Indian society. So these softwares are sort of housed within the NIC and they are the intellectual property of the state. What we don’t know enough of is how some of the data that is being generated through these softwares and actually it is that, none of these things are working because if you’ve seen the kind of images which have been uploaded on these digital attendance monitoring systems where people would just click like a photo of a cow or they’ll click a picture of an empty drawer and they just upload it and the ministry and the NIC don’t have the capacity to go through these millions of photographs which have populated. Right? So in that way, it’s also garbage in and garbage out.

But I think what they are trying to do – and this is a little bit of a leap of faith assumption – is attempt to understand what are the complexities of a biometric system that big tech needs to be aware about. There’s something that is being tested and trained across such a large mass of population that would sort of give a lot of information just on the design of the kind of infrastructure that has been set up and it will also start creating new forms of data of individuals who otherwise were completely out of this whole market economy. They were not making digital payments. They were not part of a formal banking system.

They were not part of the whole cellular revolution in one sense. They were not using mobile data. So a lot of things have happened in the last ten years where because these workers had to access more and more digital banking, they are forced to get on smartphones, they’re forced to buy data packs.

Their presence in this neoliberal economic system has been heightened almost by force and design and many of these things are linked to Aadhaar, it would also start generating very unique information about a very large set of population whose footprints otherwise were invisible in an economic sense. You might have actually heard this, they’re all called DPI, digital public infrastructures which have been sort of pushed by the Gates and the Fords and the Rockefellers of the world, who are part of the digital governance reform initiatives. Our whole understanding of the way DPI has come about in India is that it is very, very closely linked to the state-market nexus.

In one sense, it has not emerged organically from people or democratically through participation. It has been coerced through exercises of demonetization, exercises of linking bank accounts to the Aadhaar, transferring rural wages or subsidies or scholarships, all the public money only through digital banking. Earlier, India also had a very thriving post office system so if they wanted to digitize it, they couldn’t just very easily digitize post offices. A post office exists in every single village. Banks don’t exist in every single village, but this systematically clears the post office mechanism to pave ways for these banks and financial intermediaries to have access to biometric information, payments information, and attendance information in some sense even though it is not really useful.

It’s a design which is really screening of human rights violations, but also techno feudalism in a very concrete manner, which is now legitimized through a law like this, there will be rural stack of works. I don’t understand what that means, but the conversation of stacks and DPIs has become mainstream through this new act that has been passed.

Many of these reflections are also coming from a place where we, as a part of SAFAR, teach a course at National Law School, Bangalore, on digital technology, society and governance. Many of our conversations sort of revolve around the India stack, which is a payment infrastructure, the application infrastructure, and the identity infrastructure, that has been sort of promoted as the most ingenious thing that the Indian Government has done in decades.

But it’s also only to monetize data and information of common people at a very, very large scale in India but also outside India.

Scott Ferguson

So as we turn to wrap up this conversation, I guess I’d like to hear a little bit about current resistance, if there is any. Clearly you are resisting and clearly your organization is resisting, but I’m kind of curious to hear what’s the nature of resistance to this new law and the undermining of this program?

01;29;45;28 – 01;30;17;12

Khush Vachhrajani

The resistance is definitely there in areas where workers are organized. There have been protests, there have been sit-ins, there have been petitions to bureaucrats or to elected members, there have been district level convenings of workers, there have been long marches of workers in different parts of India. So the resistance is there for sure.

A belief is, that while it may take a bit of time, because of the size and the scale of the country and the complexity of the country, the resistance will start showing up more tangibly when the Panchayats or the local rural unit goes into election or the local district goes into election.

That is one way. The second is also that there are many progressive groups, associations and networks who have started advocacy with progressive state governments on creating an employment guarantee framework that is backed by state governments. How practical would that be considering the fiscal challenges that the state government would face. The attempt is to also try and imagine, collectively, how it can be done as an alternative to what the government is offering and also to build public consciousness around the limitations of this new law that is coming about.

It’s also an attempt at public education. Just yesterday, 12th of February, there was a total strike across the country, not just on the issue of NREGA but also on several other anti-labor, anti-worker legislations that had been passed by the Union government. Close to 300 million workers had come out on the streets to resist and protest, segmented in different parts and not really sort of gathered at one place.

But again, the news is out there and these resistances are going to build up, that is what my understanding is, and I am a bit hopeful, a bit optimistic about the medium and longer future of a program like this in the short run. I think because the program was so systematically dismantled and a counter narrative by the ruling government has already started spreading on the ground that the new program is going to give them 125 days instead of 100 days, there will be a phase where we will see in the short run, for lack of a better word, inaction from people on the ground or resistance of very minor scale, but nothing really tangible in that sense. But our understanding, while working with several movement campaigns has been that the inequality, the precarity, the status of falling household incomes, the debt levels, these are all growing so fast and it is all so acute that a void of a program like NREGA will be felt in very, very tangible terms. It will also be felt in cities, we assume. Women who are staying behind in villages, taking care of farms and cattle and the elderly, the children, in absence of a program which will employ 50% of those women, they really have no choice with their dignified livelihood for they to start migrating to cities in search of employment that is paying them their daily wages. That is yet to be seen.

The macroeconomic impact of the repeal of NREGA will be felt for a very long time. It is again, another piece that I’m sort of building towards. The austerity politics of this government over the last 11 years has now led us to a stage where the debt levels are alarmingly high, incomes are falling and wages have stagnated for the longest period in the history of the last 30 years or even in the history of Indian independence in that sense. So I think it’s all a very terrifying sign for the Indian economy. With public employment and, in all honesty, all of us have been even writing to the government, talking to the government, telling them that, if the aim was to just 125 days of work, that could have been done even within the NREGA form, they could have just amended the law, added 25 days more because the long standing demand for the last ten years have been that if you do 365 days of NREGA you increase the minimum floor wage from 200 to 500 rupees. All these conversations could have been taken into consideration. Looking at where the Indian economy stands today, it is very unfortunate to see that the government’s fiscal policies are very, very stagnant, I have written a couple of more articles actually that highlighted how the government in their public communication, has been constantly grappling with the fact that the industry or the market is not investing enough in the economy.

My whole point is, yes, because the sales are not happening. There is no demand. When there is no demand in a capitalist economy, nobody’s going to invest. There’ll be unemployment, there’ll be stagnation of wages and no matter what tinkering that they do through the monetary policy, it’s not going to work. It has to be done through a very, very strong fiscal policy, through fiscal stimulus, by putting money in people’s pockets, through wages to incomes, through pensions, through scholarships, so that they’re able to then save and spend in the economy.

But it seems that this is a very alien concept to the government in power, which has been taken over by the neoliberal economic thinkers who are caring more about the stock market than the lives and livelihoods of people.

William Saas

So no consumer demand, but a surplus of pictures of cows at work sites or around work sites.

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes.

William Saas

Useless garbage-in, garbage-out, data collected.

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And just between us, here’s a funny, funny anecdote. We had somebody come into our classroom for the course I mentioned in my earlier response. That person said that the total number of people who are employed in the federal department that oversees these technological interventions and whatever that is coming to them, is a grand total of two.

So it’s a grand total of two people in a ministry looking at the design, the development, the deployment, and what is coming out of these so-called technological master strokes. We know what the future holds. It’s unverifiable information, but I would not be surprised if it is true.

William Saas

Yeah, I can imagine a kind of absurd comedy-like novel written about those two bureaucrats in charge of the 100 million person program.

So your Substack, it’s called “The Lighthouse,” but it’s, also you can find it by going to moneypolitics.substack.com. Money politics, obviously, is a phrase that we’re very invested in and familiar with, and we’ve talked about your article “How to Kill a Golden Goose,” which engages particularly with the work of Jakob Feinig, and moral economists of money and monetary silencing.

Just a last question. On our way out the door, we, at Money on the Left, have been interested in and talking about complementary currencies in the development of alternative payment schemes. I’m ignorant also of the history of complementary currencies in India generally. But do you have any sense of any movement in that direction as a way of sort of filling the holes and addressing the gaps that are being created by the government?

Khush Vachhrajani

Not really. That is something that I’ve been thinking about as well. So I am not really aware of any such efforts. I would love to know more if there are people who are working on things like that. It’s also something that I think about in the times when fiscal federalism is under attack.

What is it that the state governments could do differently to sort of survive and sustain in such a hostile environment from a very dominant political force that is there to last? It’s something that even I need to learn more about. Again, Money on the Left has been something which has really shaped my thinking and it has really pushed my own imagination in the sense of being able to think about ideas like this. I look forward to reading more about works that are happening around unique currencies in the US and some of these other experiments which are happening in Europe, which has come up in both Superstructure and the podcast.

So, yeah, I keep my eyes open for things like these and I’m really, really curious to learn more as to what India can do or Indian states and society can do in terms of alternative currencies and just imagination of monetary design in general.

William Saas

Well, Khush Vachhrajani, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. We’re very, very glad to have had you on Money on the Left. Thank you.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

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.