The CFPB Asked the Fed for Zero Dollars, Three Quarters Running

The Consumer Financial Protection Act requires the Federal Reserve to transfer the CFPB whatever amount its director certifies is "reasonably necessary" each quarter — the Bureau isn't funded by Congress, it draws on the Fed. Every prior director used that mechanism to keep the lights on.▸ Acting Director Russell Vought, who runs the Bureau while also serving as White House budget director, used it to turn the lights off: on February 8, 2025, he told Fed Chair Jerome Powell that the CFPB's $711.6 million balance was "in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment" and that "no additional funds are necessary" for the rest of that fiscal year, per reporting on his letter. He kept that posture for three straight quarters — until a judge ordered him to start asking again.

Directors Rohit Chopra and, before him, every CFPB head since 2011 filed a funds-transfer request every quarter, without exception, as the Bureau's own transfer-request archive shows going back to 2011.▸ Chopra requested $248.9 million for the first quarter of FY2025 and $245.1 million for the second. Then Vought took over in February 2025, zeroed out the remaining two quarters of FY2025 in a single letter, and kept requesting nothing through the first quarter of FY2026 — spending down the existing balance instead. A December 30, 2025 opinion from Judge Amy Berman Jackson in NTEU v. Vought forced the issue, ruling that the statute's "combined earnings" language means the Fed's revenues, not its profits, so the funding mechanism was lawful regardless of the Fed's own balance sheet. Bound by that order, Vought requested $145 million on January 9, 2026 — while writing to Powell that he still "disagree[d] with the opinion and order" — and $75.8 million on March 30, 2026, for the third quarter of FY2026.

The March letter is the sharpest document in the file.▸ Vought writes, verbatim, that the $75.8 million figure "does not reflect the amount that I believe to be reasonably necessary for the Bureau to perform its statutory functions. I believe that the Bureau can perform its statutory duties with a significantly smaller budget and provide the number above to comply with the referenced court order." In other words: the director is on record saying the number in his own funding request is not the number the law asked him to certify — he's requesting the least he can get away with, not what he was ordered to determine.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21), signed July 4, 2025, cut the CFPB's statutory funding cap — Section 30001 amends 12 U.S.C. §5497(a)(2)(A)(iii) by striking "12" and inserting "6.5" — from 12% to 6.5% of the Federal Reserve System's 2009 operating expenses, indexed for inflation.▸ That caps FY2026 transfers at $466.8 million. The Bureau's own workforce restructuring plan, a memo Deputy Director Geoffrey Gradler wrote and Vought approved, does the arithmetic against that cap: in the FY2025 budget approved under the prior administration, payroll alone ran $526.4 million — 65.27% of an $806.4 million total budget. Both numbers already exceed the new cap on their own. The memo's own words: "It would be mathematically impossible to comply with the law without a workforce restructuring and reduction."

That memo, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on March 31, 2026 as part of the same NTEU v. Vought litigation, is where the staffing plan lives.▸ It asks the court to lift the injunction that has frozen a reduction in force since 2025, so the Bureau can cut its onboard headcount of 1,174 down to 556 — a number down from 1,723 authorized positions at the start of the administration.

The cuts aren't spread evenly.▸ Supervision — the division that examines banks and lenders for compliance — loses 78% of its staff, from 350 to 77; the plan itself notes the annual exam count is already down from 107 in 2024 to a planned 64 in 2026. Enforcement, which investigates and sues companies that break consumer-finance law, loses 64%, from 137 to 50. The one division untouched is Legal, held flat at 60 — the lawyers who defend the Bureau in court, including in the very case that produced this memo, are the one group Vought's plan doesn't shrink.

Dollar figures for FY2025 Q1–Q2 and FY2026 Q2–Q3 are read from signed CFPB funds-transfer letters; FY2025 Q3–Q4 and FY2026 Q1 reflect the Bureau's public zero-request posture as reported contemporaneously, since no transfer letters were filed for those quarters. Staffing figures are the Bureau's own restructuring-plan table, current as of the March 31, 2026 filing; the underlying litigation was ongoing and the plan not yet in effect as of publication.