(C) Common Dreams
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DOGE Employee Who Screamed for CFPB Job Cuts Leaves Agency (1) [1]
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Date: 2025-05-08 13:52:35+00:00
An employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was leading efforts to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s workforce has now left the agency himself.
Gavin Kliger, who according to court filings had been central to efforts to fire roughly 1,500 of the CFPB’s 1,700-member staff, left the agency Wednesday, an email obtained by Bloomberg Law shows.
The reason given on the offboarding email is that Kliger’s “detail ended.”
His departure follows a series of stories highlighting potential financial conflicts in his investment portfolio. Kliger held up to $715,000 worth of shares in Apple Inc., Tesla Inc., Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and two cryptocurrencies, ethics records obtained by ProPublica show. CFPB ethics officials warned Kliger those investments were prohibited because the agency can regulate the companies, ProPublica reported.
Kliger, the CFPB, the White House, and a DOGE representative didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
DOGE’s work at the CFPB, which began in February, has been dogged by apparent conflicts of interest from the start. Musk is attempting to turn his social media company X into a fintech and payments processor, which would bring it under the CFPB’s regulatory oversight.
Critics including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and the original architect of the CFPB, have warned that DOGE’s effort to dismantle the consumer finance watchdog would allow Musk to gain access to sensitive information from competitor fintechs and eliminate a potential regulator.
Central Figure
Kliger was hired as a senior adviser for IT issues at the Office of Personnel Management and designated as a GS-15 employee on the governmentwide pay scale, according to records obtained by Bloomberg News through the Freedom of Information Act. Employees at that level working in the Washington, D.C., area can earn $167,000 to $195,000.
Kliger was also a central figure in DOGE’s efforts to gut the US Agency for International Development, the IRS, and other federal agencies.
At the CFPB, Kliger pushed hard to complete a reduction-in-force in April after the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allowed the CFPB to conduct targeted job cuts. Kliger kept CFPB employees up for 36 hours straight and berated them for not working hard enough to carry out the firings, according to declarations filed by the National Treasury Employees Union and other plaintiffs challenging the shutdown moves.
The appeals court subsequently restored an order putting those job cuts on hold for now.
Kliger was also found to have reposted content from White nationalists and made other offensive posts on his private X account as recently as January, according to multiple media outlets.
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[1] Url:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/doge-employee-leaves-cfpb-after-leading-trumps-mass-firing-plan
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