WASHINGTON — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a lengthy rulemaking agenda, an ambitious bid for the bureau that is expected to lay off most of its staff following an
The CFPB quietly published its updated spring 2025 rulemaking agenda, featuring 24 items
The rulemaking agenda was published briefly on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website, before it became inaccessible with a message saying the site was under maintenance.
The long list of rules also suggests that, despite the decision from a federal appeals court on Friday that allows the bureau’s acting Director Russell Vought to fire 90% of the agency’s staff, the Trump administration sees some sort of a future for the CFPB. The agency’s employees will have some degree of time before they are laid off, and the employee union is widely expected to appeal the appeals court decision, which could result in another pause on the anticipated reduction in force.
That said, it will be a difficult task for the hobbled agency to achieve many of these rules.
“The notion that the CFPB can write, and can develop policy accounting or these very often very difficult policy questions and stakeholder viewpoints on so many different disparate subjects with such a small number of experienced rule writers seems dubious,” said Mike Silver, a financial services lawyer who worked for 12 years in the CFPB’s office of regulations. “Even if you have a full headcount, this would be an incredibly aggressive agency for a three-and-a-half year period of time, so trying to do it with a drastically reduced staff seems ambitious to say the least.”
A lot of the items on the rulemaking are vague by design, so that the CFPB can adjust if needed, Silver said.
In the agenda, the CFPB said it would pursue a rulemaking on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The document said the bureau would “facilitate compliance with ECOA by clarifying obligations imposed by the statute.”
This could mean that the CFPB is looking to align the way it considers and enforces the Equal Credit Opportunity Act with President Donald Trump’s mid-July executive order that took aim at
It could also refer to the White House’s campaign against so-called debanking, including a recent executive order which ordered financial regulators to use the Equal Credit Opportunity Act to look at religion-based debanking.
The bureau also said staff will develop a rulemaking on regulatory review, which would put procedures in place for the CFPB to review rules more regularly.
Other rulemakings on the agenda include one to clarify the standard for “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” or UDAAP, authority, and several revisions to the larger participant rule. The bureau will also revisit, once again, its 2017 payday lending rule, and reconsider the Rohit Chopra-era data privacy rulemaking around Section 1033, governing open banking.
The bureau is also expected, according to the agenda, to tighten standards around which nonbank companies can be designated “risky” under Dodd-Frank 1024, and to revoke rules that publicize the designations.