I let you all down. I missed something that was probably relevant to your jobs and it may be gone forever. Earlier this week, I noticed a couple of headlines that appeared noteworthy:
“CFPB puts forward ambitious agenda despite court decision,” read a headline in the American Banker. Bloomberg‘s article said, “CFPB’s Authority Over Abusive Acts Targeted in Regulatory Agenda” Now, I love you all deeply, but not deeply enough that I can afford subscriptions to the Banker or to Bloomberg, so I was left with snippets to try and figure out what was going on.
Twice annually, federal agencies are required (I think) to publish a breakdown of what they are working on. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been doing it regularly for years here. But that regularity stopped in 2024. Having done it regularly for years, the CFPB hasn’t published a rulemaking agenda since last Fall. But that appeared to change, briefly, last week. Other outlets were quick to pick up on it, but by the time I got to the site, it was down. And then, when it came back up, it said the most recent information available was from last Fall.
Turns out, the information was published briefly, before being taken down. And the CFPB’s agenda “contained roughly twice the number of items listed in 2024,” according to a published report. How they were going to accomplish that as leaders at the Bureau pondered laying off 90% of its employees was anyone’s guess.
Was the publishing of the agenda premature? Was it taken down because there are items that shouldn’t have been included? Was it not meant to be published at all? There are no answers to those questions yet.
The CFPB has taken steps in the past few months to unwind guidance that it offered under previous administrations. Whether the rulemaking agenda indicates further deregulation efforts, it’s important to note that even deregulation has a process.
“It’s important to remember that deregulation is not the absence of rulemaking—it is a form of rulemaking,” said Brandy Bruyere, partner at Honigman, LLP in the report linked above. “Even when an agency seeks to eliminate or scale back existing rules, it must still comply with the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires publishing proposals, inviting public comment, and addressing those comments in any final rule. While some may assume that ‘hitting delete’ is as simple as removing a line of code, in practice it takes legal work and resources to unwind a regulation.”
For a summary of what was published — and then removed — click here
