Reed Alumni Purged From Federal Jobs Speak Out

Immediately after taking power, the second Trump administration began its promised massive purge of federal government employees overseen by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, through the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE has fired tens of thousands of federal government employees, with layoffs hitting the federal government’s 220,000 probationary employees especially hard. To better understand the effects of the federal government purges on civil servants and the American public, the Quest spoke to two recent Reed graduates who were purged and then judicially reinstated at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Asa Ferguson ‘24 and Isabelle Caldwell ‘23. Since its founding in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has returned over $21 billion to American consumers from misconduct by consumer financial institutions. However, the Trump administration and its allies in the finance industry have been openly hostile to the CFPB and identified it as a target since before the election. 

Ferguson, a Math-Statistics graduate with a background in quantitative economics and public health research, joined the CFPB in the highly-selective Director’s Financial Analyst program as his first job out of college. CFPB DFAs rotate through multiple analytical roles in the agency during their two-year terms, and Ferguson was working as a statistical consultant for the CFPB’s enforcement division, meaning he “was part of figuring out how much money should be returned to people or whether or not a certain practice was abusive.” When the CFPB is in the process of an enforcement investigation against a company, it issues what are known as civil investigative demands to requisition enormous amounts of financial data for analysis. The CFPB data engineering team “would take that data, figure out how to load it into a big [PostgreSQL] database, and then it was my job once that data was loaded into the Postgres database to communicate with the attorneys,” Ferguson explained. He would translate legal and regulatory questions from CFPB attorneys into a data context, complete the analysis, and come back to the attorneys with conclusions in a cyclical process. In some cases, Ferguson was just checking and replicating previous analyses before the CFPB sued based on them, and in others he was one of the first sets of eyes on the data helping the attorneys understand what they had access to. 

Caldwell, an Economics major, started as a Research Assistant in the CFPB’s Office of Research in August 2023. In the Office of Research, which researches consumer financial products, Caldwell’s work has included a range of projects, such as a survey out to federal student loan borrowers across the country to learn about their experiences with repayment after the COVID-19 loan pause, a data spotlight on the financial health of small business owners compared to non-small business owners, and an annual report on mortgages mandated by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. She was also planning to work on fair lending exams, “where we work with lawyers to see if there's any disparate impact [of lending practices]… if Black and white Americans are getting the same kind of loans, the same kind of terms.” She was just starting to get trained to assist on a fair lending exam when DOGE turned its sights to the CFPB. When the Quest spoke with Caldwell at the end of March, she said “I don't really know what the state of fair lending exams is right now. I think it's pretty non-existent.”

“Inauguration happens on [January] 20, and for about a week or two after that, there's this weird vibe at the CFPB where it's like the calm before the storm,” Ferguson said. Like all civilians working in the federal government, CFPB employees first received buyout emails from the Office of Personnel Management offering pay until September in exchange for resignation. About 75,000 federal employees accepted these offers, although some were re-hired soon afterwards after the administration realized the importance of their work. DOGE personnel came to other federal agencies one by one, demanding access to sensitive personal data kept by agencies like the Social Security Administration and firing thousands of employees across the country without cause. One of the architects of the purges is Project 2025 advocate, self-described Christian nationalist, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. “Everyone in the bureau breathed a huge sigh of relief when [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent was made Acting Director and not Russ Vought… so everyone was like, ‘Oh, they might not want to kill us,’” explained Ferguson.

On Thursday, February 6, CFPB had an initial visit from across the street, and three DOGE employees arrived and established operations in the basement the following Friday, February 14. “I also took a lap of the basement just to sort of see what I saw, but they were in locked conference rooms,” Ferguson said. When a coworker asked Ferguson if he thought they would still be employed Monday, Ferguson said, “I think we're going to be okay for now, based on the best information that I have. But that day, in the afternoon… Elon Musk Tweets, ‘CFPB RIP [tombstone emoji].’ And everyone's like, ‘Oh no.’” At 8:00pm the same day, Russ Vought was named Acting CFPB Director. The next day was a Saturday, and Ferguson says CFPB staff became worried of a “USAID-type situation,” referencing DOGE’s previous illegal weekend shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development, which was completed at 7:00am on a Monday morning. 

Ferguson and a colleague made a plan to take overtime and remain in the CFPB building from Sunday night into Monday morning. “Supposing we live in a constitutional democracy, the building’s open 24/7 and there's nothing wrong with taking overtime,” he said. However, on Sunday afternoon at roughly 2:00pm, CFPB staff got an email from their Chief Operating Officer saying that the building would be shut down starting the upcoming work week. Ferguson rushed to the building, having heard from coworkers that security said the building would still be open until midnight, but on the way a new message came in: “They’ve started to lock us out right now.” By the time he arrived at the building lobby, security was no longer letting people in, although some staff who were already in the office at the time expressed an intention to stay working until they were kicked out. 

A regulations attorney came up to the security guards and asked for the specific directive they received from the administration in writing. The security staff agreed and printed out their instructions, which Ferguson noted resembled stage directions more than policy guidance. Ferguson had already cleared valuables out of his cubicle on Friday in anticipation of a potential lockout, but other employees, like Caldwell, had computers, diplomas, and assorted personal items locked inside. 

On Monday, February 17, Russ Vought sent out a stop-work order for the CFPB, telling them to cease all work tasks. Ferguson said, “There's this really weird period at this time where we're all locked out. We're not allowed to do work, and we're just kind of waiting for the axe.” DOGE fired all probationary CFPB employees on Tuesday at 7:00pm after locking them out of their government accounts. Ferguson and Caldwell, as termed employees, had not been terminated yet. No termination emails were sent out on Wednesday, although all but five CFPB contracts were cancelled. The administration attempted to quickly restore certain contracts they realized were illegal to cancel because they were mandated by statute. On Thursday, Ferguson says coworkers realized they were locked out of their work computers, and term fellows received a termination letter to the email they originally applied with around 7:00pm. 

Caldwell, who applied to the CFPB with her now-deactivated Reed email, was not able to read her own termination letter. She recalls, “Thursday night, it was like around 6:00 or 7:00pm, other research assistants were like, ‘Oh, I can't log into Teams. Oh, like, my computer's just, like, not working anymore,’” which clued her into the situation. Caldwell’s boss forwarded her the letter, which said she was fired effective immediately and would get one month of health insurance but no severance, dental, vision, or any other benefits. The letter did not include any information about what happened to employees’ retirement accounts or what to do with their computers. The government returned Caldwell’s items from her office about two weeks later. “They packaged it up for me in a box and I had to come at a 15 minute interval, and I couldn't be early, and I couldn't be late, or else I wasn't gonna get my stuff,” she said. 

“They axed the entire [DFA] program... The way in which they've been doing these cuts, they're going for the people who are legally most vulnerable. And that's the only way they're organizing it,” Ferguson said. At the CFPB and elsewhere, DOGE’s prime targets have been probationary employees, meaning those in their first or second year, and term employees. “They did not notify me about any severance or anything. They didn't fire me for cause. They said the cause was compliance with an executive order,” Ferguson said. The federal government is meant to send terminated employees two forms so they can file for unemployment, but Ferguson only received these weeks later. 

After two dozen states sued the Trump administration for the illegal termination of federal employees, a federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order on March 13 restoring purged federal employees to their former positions. On March 16, the Office of Human Capital sent purged CFPB employees a letter informing them of their reinstatement and promising back pay and restored systems access, although the letter noted that the CFPB building remained closed. Ferguson and Caldwell have both accepted reinstatement, although Caldwell notes that not all fired employees were initially so lucky, because “the way that the CFPB interpreted the judge’s order… was that only probationary [and] termed employees who were in their probationary period or first two years got reinstated.” She knows other research assistants in their third or fourth years at the agency who weren’t initially reinstated because they were not considered probationary employees. 

Even the relief offered to employees like Ferguson and Caldwell is only temporary. The Trump administration is likely to pursue a formal Reduction in Force for the CFPB in the near future, which would provide a legal path to termination of federal employees the administration wishes to remove, unlike the illegal actions taken by DOGE. However, because the CFPB was created by an act of Congress, it can only be officially eliminated by the legislative branch, not executive action. On March 28, federal judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington D.C. issued an order preventing the Trump administration from dismantling the CFPB, including through a RIF, in a lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union. This order also reinstated all previously fired term employees, including those not covered by the Maryland ruling. “They're basically trying to delete the CFPB, which they really can't do as agency heads,” Caldwell said. 

The Trump administration is appealing the Berman Jackson order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where two of three judges hearing the case are Trump appointees.  Caldwell said she believes DOGE is so determined in part because Elon Musk is trying to start a payment platform called X Money. “Who would regulate X Money? The CFPB. So [Musk is] trying to take out the government agencies that would most affect him,” she said. Caldwell is far from alone in this assessment; The New York Times published an article on Musk’s obvious personal interest in dismantling the CFPB on February 13. The CFPB is the main authority regulating online payment platforms.

The possible loss of the CFPB would have a serious impact on American consumers’ rights. Ferguson explains, "CFPB got set up to supervise consumer financial institutions–so that's your banks, your payment processors, your credit card companies–and enforce the law against them when there was a violation, and also to monitor the market and do research and to additionally listen to consumer complaints. So if you had a complaint about any consumer financial product or service, you could submit that complaint to the CFPB, and the CFPB could help you to get to the bottom of your problem." Without the CFPB, consumers will have to take legal action against misconduct by consumer financial institutions without the support of the federal government, putting big banks and financial services companies in a much more powerful position. 

Asked what they would tell Reedies interested in public service, Ferguson and Caldwell both emphasized that although the immediate prospects look poor and the long-term consequences are yet to be seen, people shouldn’t abandon public interest work and advocacy. “Don't stop trying. That just makes it worse,” Caldwell said.

The views expressed in this article were shared and recorded during the time in which both sources were terminated from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the United States. A source was permitted to review a draft of this article to ensure it did not contain information jeopardizing their personal safety.