A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official charged with laying off the agency’s staff said the Trump administration pushed to fully shutter the watchdog as recently as last week, even as a court probes whether it can.

The official, testifying under the pseudonym Alex Doe at a hearing Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said the CFPB’s reduction-in-force team held meetings with the Office of Personnel Management as late as March 6 to discuss the process for eliminating the agency. Doe was the leader of the CFPB RIF team.

CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta has taken steps to bring back some key CFPB functions, such as its congressionally mandated consumer response operation. But according to Doe, those efforts are merely intended to keep the agency running before it’s shut down entirely.

“No one has told me the plan has changed,” Doe said.

The second phase of the plan was to eliminate the rest of the CFPB’s employees within 90 days, according to testimony from Doe and CFPB Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez.

The plan was to eliminate around 1,200 positions by Feb. 14, the officials testified. The CFPB reached a deal at the time with the National Treasury Employees Union and other plaintiffs to put the mass firing on hold while Judge Amy Berman Jackson weighs a preliminary injunction.

At a meeting following a Feb. 14 hearing before Jackson, Martinez said the agreement would delay the RIF, Doe testified.

“I remember him referring to it as a problem,” Doe said.

Despite the pending litigation, the CFPB RIF team’s last meeting with OPM was intended to discuss the costs of having the White House personnel office shut down the consumer watchdog, Doe said.

“We were paying them to help us lay ourselves off,” Doe said.

The case is NTEU v. Vought, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00381, evidentiary hearing 3/11/25.