A federal judge seems likely to temporarily block the Trump administration from dismantling a major consumer protection agency, fearing a delay could leave nothing for the court to save.

This week, DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson sat through what she called an “illuminating two days” of witness testimony on the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), including plans for a mass reduction-in-force (RIF) of nearly 1,200 employees. The testimony came from a top agency executive and two additional CFPB employees, representing opposing viewpoints. The government tried to demonstrate that early chaos at the bureau had settled into tentative stability — but Jackson was clearly dubious. “A lot of evidence has been introduced that supports a decision that the same people who were sitting in a room and talking about RIFing are still sitting in a room and talking about RIFing,” she said.

Jackson has asked the government to extend an agreement to pause future terminations while she deliberates on a longer-term preliminary injunction, which she aims to decide on later this month. That could mean the difference between helping Americans in dire financial straits — or leaving them on their own for far longer than usual

Jackson cautioned that her thinking was not final. But a preliminary injunction would represent a significant blow to the Trump administration, which has tried to downsize, if not fully dismantle, the financial regulator. Whittling down the agency staff until there’s no one left “might be something that’s allowed to happen, but I don’t think it’s allowed to happen in the way it’s happening,” Jackson says.

The CFPB handles consumer complaints about both traditional financial institutions and other companies offering financial products, like the digital payments service Elon Musk’s X plans to offer. CFPB witnesses told the court that workers for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — the office that Musk has made himself the public face of — were intimately involved in plans to rapidly cut the agency’s staff, leaving major questions about whether the agency could carry out its statutorily required duties.

A key allegation in the case — brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and groups that rely on the CFPB’s work — is that CFPB acting director Russell Vought is violating constitutional separation of powers by trying to dismantle an agency created by Congress and keep it from doing work mandated by statute. Justice Department attorneys have defended the Trump administration’s actions, saying that it never meant to prevent work explicitly required by the law and that work could be preserved even if it’s under the umbrella of a different agency. But this hearing’s testimony left the impression that’s either a misrepresentation or an outright lie.

While March 10th saw several hours of testimony from CFPB chief operating officer Adam Martinez, the next day Jackson heard from witnesses who told a more harrowing version of Vought’s mid-February stop-work directive and DOGE’s push to eliminate the vast majority of staff within 30 days. Those witnesses included a direct report of Martinez’s, using the pseudonym Alex Doe due to fear of retaliation.

Doe alleges they were put in charge of the team organizing mass firings and described several meetings between the RIF team and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which advised on how to terminate roughly 1,200 of the agency’s 1,700-person workforce in short order.

In a February 13th meeting Doe attended alongside Martinez, two DOGE staffers who had been detailed to the CFPB participated, Doe testified. One of those staffers, Jeremy Lewin, appeared on and off of the Teams meeting screen because he said he was consulting with Vought, according to Doe. The DOGE staffers and Vought pushed for RIF notices to be sent the next day, Doe testified, with no explanation for the haste.

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