By Douglas Gillison
(Reuters) -The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a list on Friday of nearly 70 policy and regulatory guidance documents stretching back more than a decade that the agency plans to rescind.
The announcement, which was not final, was the latest step in the administration’s radical reorientation of the CFPB’s work under President Donald Trump.
The agency, created after the 2008 financial crisis to serve as a watchdog for American consumers against predatory business practices, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The documents rescinded provided policy and guidance oversight on matters as varied as debt collections in nursing homes, supervision of companies offering financial services to military servicemembers, discrimination in lending based on gender and sexual orientation and the publication of consumer complaint data.
Some were policies and guidance issued under the prior Trump administration.
In a notice posted Friday to the Federal Register’s website, acting CFPB Director Russell Vought said the policy documents — which offer interpretations of existing law and announce bureau priorities — sometimes imposed illegal requirements on companies or simply increased the regulatory burden unnecessarily.
Even where guidance documents were not necessarily improper, “it is the Bureau’s current policy to avoid issuing guidance except where necessary and where compliance burdens would be reduced rather than increased,” Vought said.
Republicans have long charged that the CFPB used such policy documents to avoid issuing regulations subject to public comment and legal challenges.
The decision to scrap them is not yet final but the bureau will not enforce them during a pending review, according to Vought.
In a statement, Brady Williams, legal counsel at Better Markets, which advocates for tougher financial oversight, said the CFPB’s move implied it could dismantle its public-facing consumer complaint database.
“This is not just bureaucratic housekeeping.
This is a calculated demolition of the tools consumers and advocates rely on to protect themselves from financial abuse,” Williams said.
Rob Nichols, head of the American Bankers Association, an industry lobby, hailed the move, saying in a statement he hoped it marked a “turning point” for the CFPB’s approach to regulation.
Before Trump fired former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in February, the agency released a compendium of its guidance documents, noting that under a Supreme Court decision last year, courts, and not federal agencies, will have the final say in how arcane regulatory laws must be interpreted.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison; editing by Pete Schroeder and Aurora Ellis)
