Now the story of a Charlotte attorney who was a lifelong Republican and then got DOGE'd in February as part of the massive wave of firings of federal employees. Reporter Michael Graff wrote about it for The Assembly, and he joins me now.
Marshall Terry: I have to say, I don't think I've seen DOGE used as a verb before reading your story. I imagine it becoming the Oxford Word of the Year. Anyway, tell me about Jack Cobb. He recently gave up his lucrative private-practice career to go and work for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Remind me first what that is, and what did Cobb do there?
Michael Graff: Jack's an attorney in Charlotte. He had a long, celebrated career in private practice and decided that he wanted to go work in public service. So the CFPB was created after the 2008 financial collapse, which obviously hit Charlotte hard, and Jack knew several people who had lost their jobs in that.
Essentially, what the CFPB does, in its purest form, was to look at predatory practices or hidden fees and things like that, and try to be an advocate on behalf of consumers. Attorneys in Jack's department at the CFPB — the enforcement department — would bundle a bunch of complaints and then take it to the financial institution as one big complaint — and then hopefully get the money back in the hands of ordinary people.
Jack is a really interesting character. Part of the complexity is that he was a lifelong Republican. He switched to unaffiliated just last year. He did not vote for Trump in any of the three elections that Trump has run in, but he does drive a blue Tesla — and he admires a lot of the work that Elon Musk has done, from Starlink to SpaceX to things like that.
Jack doesn't fit in a box. This is not a politically motivated story. He was very clear-eyed with his comments and his thoughts about how this all happened.
Terry: Well, what's the argument this administration is making in dismantling the bureau, and what's Cobb's response to that argument?
Graff: Well, the larger argument from Musk and others is that the country's been kind of overrun by regulators. Musk uses the analogy sometimes that it's like a football game. You want to have referees on the football field, but you don't want to have the field full of referees. You want the players to be able to perform.
Some Republicans in recent years have argued that, especially under the Biden administration, the CFPB sort of became this 'woke bureaucracy,' as they call it, and that it hurts smaller institutions more than it does the larger banks.
Cobb argues that reform is fair game, but this, to him, wasn't reform — it was a purge. He was told to stop working. He was told to ignore emails. And then they all got this letter that was just a form letter, and it didn't even have his name. It said, 'you have been terminated from your job as [Insert position],' basically. So, he just thought it was really impersonal.
Terry: And Cobb said the email he got firing him basically said he was unqualified. And you point out in the story — that's an important detail. Why?
Graff: Yeah, the line was 'your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency's current needs.' For Cobb, that was a slap in the face. He has this incredible career — so many folks who would be willing to back that up, to say he's an exemplary employee.
It was also a legal maneuver. A judge would later rule that the administration was using that line to get around the federal requirement of notifying states ahead of time before a mass layoff. The federal government needs to notify states that they're going to lay off a bunch of people because of the effects it's going to have on the unemployment system in each state.
In this case, according to the judge, the government was using that line to work around that requirement — that they don't have to let the states know ahead of time. The judge ultimately called this untrue and said these weren't performance-based firings. They were blanket terminations.
Terry: So, only a few days after getting fired, Cobb was actually reinstated — but he resigned instead. Why, and what is he going to do now?
Graff: His words are: 'Some things you break, you can't get it back together.' And he thinks this will be the legacy of DOGE. Cobb is going to be fine financially. He's had a long career in private practice as a lawyer. He's worried about his colleagues. Some of them are going through cancer treatments and needed stable employment, or some of them have young kids. And he just thought it was wrong the way it was handled.
My editors and I thought this was a really interesting story of what's going to happen to top talent in the federal government. Is the federal government really going to be able to hire people who are experienced, who are the most well-educated, most thoughtful people in their respective fields? It seems like it's a real hit on their ability to recruit people. And that was part of the story that I wrote.
I went through and talked to a few folks about that. And they said, Yeah, it's going to be hard to recruit these people back because, for the most part, people who work in public service are doing it because they want to help, not because it's very lucrative.
So, yeah, Cobb quit. And now he's going to work as an in-house counsel for a bank in Charlotte. In some cases, he'll be sitting across the table from people who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — if it's still around.
Terry: So that's one person's story. What does it say about the broader DOGE effort?
Graff: I don't know what will happen with the federal workforce, and Jack doesn't either. He sees it as not just trimming fat, it's gutting agencies. If government work isn't valued, I guess the question becomes: Will high-quality workers go work for a place where they're not valued? A noble calling is only noble if the leaders also believe in it — is kind of how he puts it.
