On April 24, the CFPB filed a reply brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in support of its request to modify the stay pending appeal to permit the Bureau to immediately carry out a reduction-in-force (RIF) plan. The reply responds to the CFPB employee union’s opposition to the Bureau’s motion (covered by InfoBytes here), which urged the court to deny the request and instead allow the district court to consider it without an imposed deadline (covered by InfoBytes here). In its reply, the Bureau argued that the court should “re-modify” its stay to restore the partial stay originally granted in April 2025, which permitted the Bureau to terminate employees deemed unnecessary to its statutory duties following a “particularized assessment.” The Bureau contended it had already satisfied Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 8 by previously seeking a stay from both the district court and the D.C. Circuit, dismissing the union’s procedural objections as “meritless.”

The Bureau cited three intervening developments it said warranted re-modification of the stay: (i) the acting director’s approval of a detailed RIF plan explaining how the Bureau would continue to fulfill its statutory obligations with fewer employees; (ii) intervening Supreme Court precedent limiting injunctive relief to remedying a movant’s “demonstrated injuries;” and (iii) congressional reduction of the Bureau’s funding from the Fed, which the Bureau argued would make current staffing levels “financially untenable.” The Bureau maintained that the proposed RIF, which the reply brief notes would retain more than 550 employees and preserve every existing division, did not constitute a shutdown and would not prevent the union from obtaining “meaningful relief” at the conclusion of the litigation. The Bureau also defended the proposed 45-day deadline for the remand, noting the district court required “only 43 days” to evaluate the original complaint, hold hearings, and issue the preliminary injunction. Noting that the Bureau had not previously sought a stay in the Supreme Court, the brief asserts that, if subjected to “temporally unlimited” district court proceedings while remaining bound by the RIF prohibition, the Bureau “may revisit the propriety of seeking further review.”