On Sunday, I wrote about the immense potential of early Trump administration efforts to restrain and even to reduce the federal bureaucracy. On Monday, employees of one of the most insidious aspects of that bureaucracy did not go to work. And it wasn’t due to the snow that has hit D.C. this week.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, in his capacity as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, instructed employees not to come into the latter agency’s office from February 10 to February 14. It’s part of a broader effort to rein in CFPB. Brittany Bernstein elaborated on the details of this effort, which includes rejecting a tranche of its funding, restricting employee communications, ceasing ongoing investigations and enforcement actions, and refraining from issuing further regulatory guidance.

These are welcome steps. CFPB sits at an intentionally bizarre remove from our constitutional system. For example: The source of the funding that Vought has restricted is not Congress, but the Federal Reserve. There is a strong case for the agency’s abolition, one to which Congress may be receptive, according to Semafor.

That there is serious interest in restraining the agency is a strong indicator that the Trump administration is ignoring the counsel of those on the right who favor retaining an expanded state. Just before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I noted that a former policy adviser for JD Vance supported keeping the bureau as it was. Somehow, to do so would better serve Trump’s interests and voters than getting rid of it. Like Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, who disdains efforts to limit and even abolish the Department of Education, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.,), who helped create the agency and is decrying the steps being taken against it, this adviser lacked the ability to imagine a more limited federal government. Well, that has not been true of the Trump administration thus far, as Ronald Reagan Office of Personnel Management Director Donald Devine explains for us.