Trump rolls back CFPB, USAID and Department of Education: Where things stand
President Trump supercharged his overhaul of government agencies this week that included a fresh round of a widespread firings.
Trump signed an order this week indicating agency heads initiate large scale “reductions in force,” also known as RIFs, as part of implementing initiatives spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The order targets a number of federal agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Department of Education.
Here’s where Trump’s rollback of various agencies stand.
CFPB
About 70 employees were dismissed from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, out of about 1,700 people who work at the bureau. The employees who were let go were largely on probationary status.
Jonathan McKernan was tapped to chair the bureau and replace acting director Russell Vought, who also serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, as acting director, had ordered employees to halt all work and announced he would not take the agency’s last drawdown from the Federal Reserve.
“The Bureau's current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment. This spigot, long contributing to CFPB's unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he said on social platform X.
Despite the cuts, Richard Cordray, the first director of the CFPB who served under the Obama administration from 2012 to 2017, told The Hill he thinks the Trump administration is being more careful about slashes at the CFPB compared to other agencies because it has to work around the law that created the bureau.
“In some ways, this suggests that the rest of the employees, they recognize that they do have legal protections, and they’re going to move more slowly and more carefully on that front,” Cordray said. “I'm not convinced that they're willing to just drop a nuclear bomb on the place and think that that's going to serve them well with the American public.”
“There's some reason initially, for alarm, but there’s a couple other reasons to think cooler heads may be prevailing here over time,” he added.
The CFPB also created a tip line on X, calling for people to report if they are being pursued by CFPB enforcement or supervision staff that could be in violation of Vought’s “stand down order.”
USAID
Perhaps no other agency has been as hard hit as the U.S. Agency for International Development, with Musk’s DOGE moving in recent weeks to stanch the flow of foreign aid, dismantle the entire agency responsible for administering it and dismiss thousands of people working for the agency at home and abroad.
USAID, which had more than 10,000 employees total, was slashed to just a few hundred. The matter has been making its way through federal courts where judges have blocked the freeze on foreign aid contracts.
As of late Thursday evening, one judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from issuing or enforcing terminations, suspensions or stop-work orders in connection with any federal foreign aid awards that were in existence before Trump returned to the White House.
The fight for the future of the agency has also seen current and former USAID employees sue Musk for his operation, arguing that he should have been confirmed by the Senate before he could act in such a powerful manner.
The Trump team though is all in on ending USAID’s work. Trump often cites it as the most-glaring example of government fraud and waste. Trump and his administration often list examples of “fraud” and “waste” they claim they’ve found at the agency, though there’s been arguments over how accurate and transparent their findings are.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in Thursday, he said USAID, which was started by his uncle, has since become a “sinister propagator of totalitarianism” and backed Trump’s recent actions at the agency.
Education Department
Trump campaigned on significantly overhauling or eliminating the Department of Education, and the president said Wednesday he would like the Department of Education to be “closed immediately,” calling the agency a “big con job.”
Trump said late last week that the department was the next agency he would ask Musk to look into as well as massive Pentagon spending, which takes up more than half of the entire U.S. budget. The Department of Education has reportedly already terminated some employees, although the amount is not clear.
Already a target, Trump signed an executive order Friday that rolls back federal funding for education institutions that implement COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
While the department has been the latest target, Trump’s pick for Education secretary, Linda McMahon, had her confirmation hearing Thursday, vowing to work with Congress to end the department. She said that essential programs that operate at the department should move to different parts of the federal government.
But Trump has said in jest that he hope McMahon would soon be out of a job — suggesting her nomination was merely to oversee the dismantling of the department.
Cordray, who was chief operating officer at the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) office from 2021 to 2024, argued it would be “quite complicated” to shut off various programs that operate within the department. Trump himself has acknowledged he may not be able to under the agency without congressional approval.
“They need FSA because FSA provides the funding, the loans and the Pell grants for millions of students all over the country. And even if they do shutter the Department of Education, they’re going to have to put FSA somewhere, maybe in Treasury,” he said. But "they’re not going to wipe out all federal support for funding higher education. That would kill schools all over the country.”
SBA
Following Trump’s executive order Tuesday, more than 100 Small Business Administration (SBA) employees, who are considered on probationary status, reportedly received termination notices.
Those came after they received similar notices last week, which were in error until the president’s executive order extended DOGE’s authority to fire workers.
Another Trump ally faced confirmation hearings this week, just to have her agency potentially be slashed — SBA head Kelly Loeffler is set to be confirmed soon.
Trump had tried to fire SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware, but he is part of a lawsuit with other inspectors general arguing that their removals should be considered illegal and they should be reinstated.
IRS
DOGE aides arrived at the IRS Thursday. When asked if he expects to close the IRS, Trump said the service will be “looked at like everybody else.”
Some IRS employees were told they were exempt from a deferred buyout offer until after the April 15 deadline for individuals to file their tax returns. The employees were reportedly told they are exempt because of their critical work during tax season.
More than 75,000 federal workers have taken the buyout so far across the federal government’s 2 million workforce.
The agency though remains in Trump’s bull's-eye. The president, in the days before his inauguration, said he wanted to create an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs and other revenue from foreign countries, comparing it to the IRS.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) alerted his followers on X that his office heard “DOGE is now at the IRS.”
“That means Musk's henchmen are in a position to dig through a trove of data about every taxpayer in America. And if your refund is delayed, they could very well be the reason,” the senator said.
He warned that DOGE’s actions at the IRS, which collects taxes from Americans, could be similar to its attempts to access Treasury Department payment systems. DOGE demanded access to the systems, before a federal judge last weekend prohibited special government employees and those detailed from outside the department from them.
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