A Charlotte Regulator Gets DOGE’d

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Jack Cobb closed his work laptop at about 8 p.m. on a cold and drizzly February night in south Charlotte and stirred up an old fashioned. He settled into his couch with a book that stretched his understanding of faith and values, Dominion, which traces 2,000 years of Christianity’s command over the Western world. Cobb was somewhere around the turn of the first millennium when his phone buzzed. 

The caller was his colleague and close friend at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

“You gotta be shitting me,” he said out loud. Jack’s wife, Kimberly, looked up from across the living room. They both had a pretty good hunch that by the time he hung up, Jack, a 62-year-old lawyer with a sterling resume and decades of experience, would be out of a job.

Cobb gave up a lucrative role in private practice in 2024 to take a pay cut and enter civil service. He hoped the CFPB, which aims to give ordinary consumers an advocate in disputes against larger financial institutions, would provide him a fulfilling final career chapter.

Instead he became a puppet dangling in a dizzying political production, one that left him and his colleagues struggling to answer the simple question: Do we have a job, or don’t we? The new Trump administration made it plain that it wants the agency gone, and the phone call that February 11 night only confirmed that Cobb was among those being dismissed. 

Several weeks later, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s scorched-earth approach to terminations was unlawful, reinstating Cobb and thousands of others. Then last Friday, a different federal judge blocked the Trump administration from dismantling the CFPB until she rules on a lawsuit seeking to preserve the agency. 

By then, though, Cobb and others with standout resumes and options faced a more personal question: Do we even want this job? 

Underneath the headline-grabbing slashing and burning, a more permanent scar is forming on federal workers, including 80,000 in North Carolina. The U.S. government’s value proposition for top talent has long been that they could leave higher paying and more celebrated roles in the private sector to find a shared sense of purpose in the federal workforce. 

That’s evaporating by the day in many agencies, leaving the most recruitable civil servants to choose between working for leaders who don’t value them, or wishing the government well in its future endeavors.

A Guardrail for Banks

Congress created the CFPB in response to the 2008 economic collapse, which was caused in large part by banks’ risky subprime loan practices. CFPB’s mission was to provide a guardrail against future crashes, and it became an influential enforcement arm for the public against major institutions—many Republicans and financial leaders would say too influential. 

In its purest form, the CFPB would operate like this: If a bank instituted hidden fees on customers, those people could submit complaints to the CFPB, where attorneys in Jack’s department worked toward settlements to get the money back in the consumers’ hands. 

The CFPB’s website says that in the last 15 years, its enforcement division had achieved $19.7 billion in principal reductions, canceled debts, and other forms of consumer relief. 

Cobb loved the job. He split his time between Charlotte and Washington, and paid for his own travel and lodging for the weeks he spent up there. After nearly three decades in private practice, he felt like he was making a difference for everyday people. Whenever someone asked him to describe his work he’d tell them, “Well, I’m your lawyer.”

Then came the January 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump, the leader of the political party Cobb claimed for most of his adult life. Then came the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk, the man behind the blue Tesla that Cobb’s driven for 10 years. They brought their golden chainsaw to the CFPB, and celebrated it. “RIP CFPB 🪦” Musk posted on X. 

Their broader argument is that regulations and regulators are strangling business growth and innovation. This isn’t a new position. Republicans in Congress argued for years that the bureau abused its power under former President Joe Biden and his CFPB leader, Rohit Chopra. Still, many elected leaders saw the CFPB as necessary suspenders to keep the economy’s pants from falling down again.

Cobb expected changes after inauguration, but the emails that filled his inbox were disorienting. One in late January, titled “Fork in the Road,” came with a buyout offer that would’ve paid Cobb through September. 

Then came the firing of Chopra, which wasn’t a huge surprise, considering Biden appointed him. In early February, Cobb’s superiors, under the direction of Trump’s newly appointed acting director Russell Vought, ordered his division to discontinue work and not pursue any new cases. A follow-up on February 10 told him to not respond to emails or make any new calls related to his role. “Don’t do anything,” Cobb said of the directive. “Just truly, pencils down.”

That same day, Trump spoke briefly about the CFPB in a press conference at the Oval Office. He tied his disdain for the bureau to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who led its creation in 2010. The White House also issued a statement saying that the agency has become “another woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy.”

“You know, that was set up to destroy people,” Trump said, adding that the bureau was “a very important thing to get rid of” and that it is “a waste.” 

The next day was the day Cobb closed his laptop, poured the bourbon and bitters, opened his book about the multiplication of morality, and answered the phone call from his colleague.

“Have you checked your email?” Cobb’s colleague asked. 

Cobb opened his personal email account and saw the subject line: “Termination Notice.” He clicked on the attachment’s preview. It read, word for word and bracket for bracket: “MEMORANDUM FOR [EmployeeFirstName], [JobTitle], [Division].” 

The first sentence, from CFPB’s top human resources officer Adam Martinez, read, “This is to provide notification that I am removing you from your position of [JobTitle] and federal service consistent with the above references.”

Cobb opened his work laptop and tried to log in. It was locked. 

‘It Frost My Ass’

Cobb was one of about 175 “probationary” employees—a classification reserved for recent hires—at the CFPB who lost their jobs that week. Tens of thousands more probationary employees were fired across all federal agencies in February.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, even for organizations that track government employment. Max Stier, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that’s worked across four presidential administrations to improve the effectiveness of the federal workforce, said he expects the numbers to grow to hundreds of thousands of terminations. He’s not sure what happens after that.

“This administration, in addition to the chaos, has neither offered up a strategy or a plan for what they’re doing,” Stier said. He called the current administration “the least transparent” of any he’s seen since helping to form the nonprofit in 2001.

When Cobb downloaded the attachment for his termination notice that night, it did have his name in the spaces where the brackets were in the preview. That made it at least the slightest bit more personal, he laughed. But then he read this line: “Unfortunately, the Agency finds that that [sic] you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”

Cobb’s been called a lot of things, but “unqualified” was a new one. “Yeah,” he told me recently, pointing to the line on his screen, “it frost my ass.”

That line also caught the attention of U.S. District Judge James Bredar. In a March 13 ruling, Bredar wrote that the federal government must give states advanced notice before conducting mass layoffs, due to potential strain on those states’ unemployment offices. In this case, the judge wrote, the administration was using that performance-based line to avoid giving the notice.

“On the record before the Court, this isn’t true,” Bredar wrote. “There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively.”

Cobb felt somewhat vindicated, at least as it relates to his employment history. He’d never lost a job before this one and, to him, reasons matter. “I’m glad the judge picked up on [that line]. I’m also not surprised because it’s a lie.”

Three days later, on March 16, Cobb received another email, with the subject line: “Notice of Reinstatement.” The note ordered him back to work and told him he’d receive back pay (his annual salary was $255,000) for the month or so between notices. In other words, the government was now going to pay tens of thousands of dollars each, to tens of thousands of employees, for hundreds of thousands of hours they did not work, in the name of efficiency.

“There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively.”

U.S. District Judge James Bredar

“I guess I’m glad to have my job back, sort of,” Cobb said two days later. “But I don’t think people in my position are long for this world at the bureau. And it just underlines what a waste this whole thing is. I mean, they owe us pay for the month that we were fired. What kind of way is this to run a railroad?”

Stier, the nonprofit leader, said Cobb’s feelings are shared across the workforce: It’s not so much that they lost a job, it’s how. The constitutional approach to dismantling a congressionally created agency, if it’s outlived its welcome, would be to do it through legislation. 

“While the courts are extraordinarily important to ensure that the law is being followed, unfortunately our legal system isn’t a complete answer to the chaos and destruction that DOGE and the new administration are creating right now,” Stier said of Bredar’s ruling. “[Cobb’s story] is a perfect example. You see a judge determining what is being done is illegal, but the damage is irretrievable.”

Wild Days in Washington

Cobb had a front-row seat to the event that led to the creation of the CFPB. His city is home to some of the institutions that created modern-day, coast-to-coast banking. Thousands of bank employees in Charlotte, including some of Cobb’s friends, lost their jobs during the collapse.

Cobb grew up in south Charlotte and graduated from Charlotte Latin in 1981. He was childhood friends with John McColl, son of banking legend Hugh McColl, who led North Carolina National Bank through several evolutions that resulted in Bank of America. 

Hugh McColl is one of the most influential figures in Charlotte’s history, and in the history of the U.S. economy, for that matter. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cobb remembers McColl as the guy who’d come home from a day at the bank, roll up his sleeves, and challenge his kids and their friends to a game of basketball in the driveway.

Cobb left the city after graduation, first a short distance to Davidson College and later to the University of Virginia, where he earned his law degree. 

He married Kimberly, also a UVA law grad, and her ambitions took them to Washington. Jack worked in private practice and on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Kimberly worked in a variety of roles supporting Republican Senate leadership in the 1990s, including one in which she helped develop the strategy and rules for impeaching former President Bill Clinton.They’re familiar with wild days in Washington.

They moved to Charlotte in 1999 to raise their children. Jack worked in private practice, but found ways to scratch the civic itch. In the mid-2000s, he was part of a U.S. Senate committee sent to the Gulf Coast to investigate what went wrong in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. 

He was a partner at McGuireWoods in fall 2008 when the bottom fell out on his hometown. Friends became unemployed. Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia. Laid-off workers came down from the towers and started their own small businesses, while city and state leaders worked to recruit other industries, from energy to tech. The city fundamentally changed.

“Charlotte had seemed bulletproof until then,” Cobb said. “I would say I left that process sobered.”

While Charlotte reinvented itself, Congress took a notable step to prevent future collapses. It passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Differing Views on Oversight

Americans have a selective tolerance for watchdogs. 

A 2020 Pew study showed, for instance, that an overwhelming majority of the country (73 percent) believes the media’s role is to serve as a watchdog, but they split evenly into thirds when asked whether they believed the media was too aggressive, not aggressive enough, or appropriately aggressive. 

In other words, we like the idea of oversight but have differing views on who should be overseen, who should do the overseeing, and to what extent. And we’re certainly less comfortable with it when we know the people being dogged. Politicians at all levels of government and across party lines are quick to grow frustrated with regulators and inspectors. 

Take Atlanta. The Democrat-led city created an Inspector General’s office in 2020 to combat waste and corruption in the wake of a bribery scandal. But earlier this year, after months of complaints from the Democratic mayor’s office over employee privacy, the inspector general resigned. She told reporters that she and her team had been bullied by those who’d been the subjects of their investigations. 

Meanwhile, at the federal level around the same time, President Trump fired 17 inspectors general, independent watchdogs who oversee various agencies.

Critics of the CFPB argue that the bureau has grown too large and has too little oversight, under the guise of protecting the country from another 2008. 

Former U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry of Gaston County, who was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, called it a “rogue” bureau last year after a U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutionality of its funding model. Republicans like McHenry have long argued that the approved funding structure, in which the Federal Reserve appropriates money directly to the CFPB without congressional approval, lacks necessary oversight. 

And after Trump’s election in November, McHenry applauded the prospect of reining in the CFPB, saying at a hearing, “The era of the post-financial crisis regulation is over.”

Those long-held sentiments got a rocket boost from Musk, the world’s richest man, who generally blames regulators for everything from the slow progress of high-speed rail projects to delayed space launches.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have regulators; I’m saying we’ve gone way too far,” Musk said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in November. “Think of regulators like referees on a sports field. You don’t want to have no refs. You want to have some number of refs. But you don’t want to have way more refs than players.”

A House subcommittee meeting on the future of the CFPB on March 26 highlighted the political divides on the agency. Republicans argued that the agency has become an “unchecked and unaccountable” activist organization that burdens smaller banks and credit unions that don’t have the resources to abide by regulations. Democrats, meanwhile, lamented the Trump administration’s dismantling of the bureau and painted the agency as consumers’ last line of defense. 

First-term U.S. Rep. Tim Moore of Kings Mountain, an attorney and the former speaker of the state House, said in the hearing that he had “high hopes” for the mission of the CFPB when he entered Congress. But as he learned more, he said, he came to believe CFPB was a “predator” and an agency that’s “incentivized to get money by levying fees and fines. It’s almost like if you had a police officer out there paid more to write more tickets.” 

“That’s absurd,” Cobb told me the next day. “The agency is tasked by Congress to enforce consumer finance laws … and a big chunk of the money that the CFPB gets through enforcement actions would be money going back to consumers.”

If the CFPB vanishes, the refereeing duties it performed will likely fall to the states and their attorneys general. The N.C. Department of Justice has had its own consumer protection division since the 1970s, and residents can now submit complaints online. 

“The era of the post-financial crisis regulation is over.”

former U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry

Still, the CFPB provides the state a federal partner that “plays a vital investigative and legal role in handling large-scale financial fraud cases across the country,” N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson said in a statement to The Assembly. He said CFPB “is a proven shield against financial misconduct” and “eliminating it would be a gift to scammers.”

Regardless how the court cases play out or what Congress does, the CFPB as it was known under previous administrations is not coming back. 

In late January, the bureau ended its punishment of Wells Fargo, which has its East Coast headquarters in Charlotte, for the bank’s handling of mortgages and auto loans, Reuters reported. In March, CFPB dropped its lawsuit against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase for their alleged failure to protect customers from fraud while using Zelle, AP reported.

Consumer advocates are already shifting their messaging, warning people that when they do something like purchase a home, they’ll have to be their own watchdogs.

A Fantastic Blue Tesla

The first thing Cobb did after receiving his reinstatement notice on March 16 was grab his phone. He’d already shipped his work computer back, and didn’t have access to his work email; he wasn’t sure what his next step would be. So he called the colleague who’d alerted him to their termination a month earlier, to give her the bit of better news.

“I just thought, how poetic it would be if I called her,” he said.

Let’s get this part out of the way, at last. Yes, Cobb was a longtime Republican until switching to unaffiliated last year. No, Cobb didn’t vote for Trump in any of his three presidential election campaigns. He does, however, still own that blue Tesla. He loves it. “Fantastic car,” he said, before rattling off its virtues. He marvels at Musk’s work at SpaceX and Starlink. But his opinions on Musk have shifted.

“Less impressed with DOGE,” he said.

“It feels like we’re living in a simulation,” he said. “The world’s richest man and some 20-year-olds are out, you know, burning and slashing. … It’s hard to wrap a mind around it.”

In our four extended conversations over the past month, Cobb always returned to two points: First, some of his colleagues are suffering much worse than he is; there are people who have young children, or others going through cancer treatments and need employment stability. Second, firing people or reducing the workforce is fine and sometimes necessary, but the administration’s approach was callous and—the kicker—inefficient.

Consider how he landed at the bureau to begin with: Cobb took nearly nine months of 2024 to work through the move from private practice at Winston & Strawn to civil service—applying for the job, navigating interviews and background checks, giving his law firm a month’s notice, and helping his colleagues redistribute his client list. Deliberate, thoughtful strokes, that created a smooth transition.

He knew the risks of taking a federal job in a presidential election year, but believed that any reductions would be handled with similar care. “That’s fair game to [make cuts]. That’s not what this is,” he told me. “This really treats people with contempt. Which I think is part of the point.”

He said his colleagues are starting to scatter. “And the band’s not getting back together. That’s the story of DOGE: Some things you break, and you can’t get it back together.”

That includes Cobb. On March 21, five days after being reinstated, five weeks after being fired, and six months after starting at the CFPB, he used his personal iPad to submit his notice of resignation, effective March 28. 

This week, the short-lived bureaucrat began another late-career chapter: working in Charlotte as in-house counsel for a bank. 

Correction: This article originally stated that Cobb was a lifelong Republican. It has been corrected to say that he was a longtime Republican until changing to unaffiliated last year.