Congress moves to blind bank regulators to management failures
H.R. 3379 — HUMPS Act of 2025 · Filed by Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) · Introduced May 14, 2025 · Reported out
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What it does
This bill requires federal banking regulators to overhaul how they rate banks' safety and soundness using the CAMELS system (Capital, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity, Sensitivity to risk). It mandates that ratings be based on clear, objective criteria rather than examiner judgment, and either eliminates or severely restricts the 'Management' component to focus only on objective governance measures. The bill requires regulators to issue new rules within 12 months with public comment, but explicitly preserves their authority to take enforcement action.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is to strip subjective judgment from bank supervision and replace it with narrow, objective criteria. While framed as promoting 'fairness and consistency,' the effect is to blind regulators to management quality, governance failures, and emerging risks—classic deregulation by constraint.
What the text implies
- Eliminating or severely restricting the 'Management' component removes regulators' ability to assess whether a bank's leadership is competent, honest, or prone to risk-taking—a key early-warning signal for bank failure.
- Objective-only criteria cannot capture emerging risks, novel fraud schemes, or cultural/governance rot until they show up in hard financial numbers—by which point damage may be irreversible.
- The bill preserves regulators' enforcement authority in theory but makes it harder to act preemptively; regulators will face legal/political pressure to justify enforcement using only the narrow criteria the bill mandates.
- Deposit insurance premiums and M&A approvals will be determined by a narrower, more gameable rating system, potentially allowing weaker-managed banks to appear safer than they are.
- The 12-month rulemaking timeline and 90-day comment period are tight; industry will have significant influence over how 'objective criteria' are defined, and regulators may lack time for rigorous design.
Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.
Who it affects
By narrowing bank supervision to objective financial metrics and eliminating or gutting subjective assessment of management quality, the bill reduces regulators' ability to catch governance failures, fraud, and risk-taking before they threaten depositors and the financial system. Ordinary citizens bear the cost of bank failures and systemic instability; banks gain reduced scrutiny of how they are actually run.
Who stands to gain
- commercial banks
- bank holding companies
- financial institutions with weak governance or aggressive risk profiles
Named in the bill
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve, CAMELS rating system, Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, Federal Deposit Insurance Act, Bank Secrecy Act (chapter 2 of title I of Public Law 91–508)
Where it stands
- May 14, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in House”
- May 14, 2025 — Referred to House Committee on Financial Services · Congress.gov: “Referred to the House Committee on Financial Services”
- May 21, 2025 — Markup held in committee · Congress.gov: “Committee Consideration and Mark-up Session Held”
- May 21, 2025 — Reported out of committee · Congress.gov: “Ordered to be Reported (Amended) by the Yeas and Nays: 29 - 23”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
1 lobbying clients named this bill on 2 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Mar 2026. Those filings disclosed $37,710,000 in lobbying spend. A filing names 272 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 0% of bills with at least one filing.
Scott Fitzgerald, the sponsor, reported $915,000 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A. — $37,710,000 on 2 filings
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 14, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (3,569 characters) on Jul 25, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 16,222 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Mar 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 14, 2026 · page rendered 2026-10-20.
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