This Consumer Protection Cop Was Just Thrown Off the Beat by DOGE
The Trump and Musk administration is continuing its vandalism of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the federal agency that has returned more than $20 billion to Americans who have been scammed and cheated by financial firms, ranging from payday lenders to big banks.
On Tuesday night, the administration began a purge of CFPB, including staff and contractors. The contractors, according to a CFPB attorney with knowledge of the situation, include nearly two dozen people in “consumer response” who work “helping consumers get their money back.” The laid-off staffers were “provisional” employees, or people who had less than a year of tenure with the bureau and therefore fewer worker protections. (Rolling Stone is informed that these terminations included some employees who had previously agreed to Elon Musk’s Fork in the Road program, which promised a paid “vacation” through September to employees who agreed to “deferred resignation.”)
The dismissals follow a stop-work order and a funding freeze implemented by acting CFPB director Russell Vought — the Project 2025 architect who was recently Senate confirmed to lead Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. While the bureau’s offices are empty, Musk’s controversial cadre of programmers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have reportedly been rifling through CFPB data and systems.
Musk — the Trump megadonor who has assumed unprecedented power in the Trump administration — has targeted the CFPB for elimination, as has Trump, who alleged this week that the bureau “was set up to destroy some very good people.”
In a mark of the human disregard that has defined the opening days of the administration, the memo to terminated CFPB employees did not name them or their job titles individually. The form letter resembled a failed mail-merge, and included only generic fields where personal details should have been, reading for example “[EmployeeFirstName],” “[EmployeeLastName],” and “[JobTitle].”
An attorney with the CFPB calls the mass firing “arbitrary and unfair” — highlighting the loss of talented young colleagues who were eager to launch careers in public service. “These are people that could make three times as much money in the private sector, but they chose to work for the American people.”
The mass layoffs will also hollow out the ranks of consumer protection cops. One of these CFPB “compliance examiners,” based in Texas, is Taylor Sonne, who joined the bureau in March 2024.
Sonne’s work saw him traveling across western states, rooting out “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices,” known in bureau jargon as UDAAPs. He also helped ensure compliance by financial institutions — “none of which are being monitored right now under the Vought’s order to cease all activity,” he says.
Sonne believes his firing by form letter was illegal — “it is just embarrassing how the whole thing was pushed out” — but insists he’s angrier about the fate of CFPB: “I am most upset with what the administration is doing to the agency and how it will affect consumers. Fighting for everyday Americans and protecting people’s money was my priority and my passion.”
The form letter informed all provisional employees that “your ability, knowledge, and skills don’t fit” the agency’s needs. “That is insulting and contradictory to stellar performance reviews,” says Sonne, who previously worked in consumer protection for the state of Texas. “I am absolutely qualified to protect consumers, and that’s why I was hired in the first place.”
The CFPB did not immediately respond to questions from Rolling Stone about its shabby termination notice. Sonne says he intends to contest his dismissal as driven by ideology rather than merit: “While my work at the bureau was non-partisan,” he says, “I believe this termination is politically motivated.”
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