Banking regulators forced to justify deregulation every 7 years
H.R. 6544 — REVIEW Act of 2025 · Filed by William Timmons (R-SC) · Introduced Dec 9, 2025 · Reported out
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What it does
This bill requires federal banking regulators (the Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, CFPB, and similar agencies) to review the cumulative impact of their own regulations every 7 years instead of the current schedule. Each agency must assess how their rules affect consumer access to financial products, credit availability, financial market liquidity, and the safety of the financial system, then recommend which regulations to streamline, simplify, or eliminate. The bill also requires a coordinated report to Congress summarizing these internal reviews and identifying regulatory burdens.
Why we flagged it
The bill's stated purpose is regulatory review, but its operative mechanism—requiring agencies to identify regulations as 'unnecessarily burdensome' and recommend elimination—is functionally a deregulation mandate. The framing as 'efficiency' and 'verification' masks a structural bias toward reducing regulatory scope rather than neutral assessment.
What the text implies
- The bill requires agencies to assess 'balance of benefits and costs' but does not require them to weight consumer protection, safety, or systemic stability equally against industry compliance costs—creating a structural bias toward deregulation.
- By requiring agencies to 'quantify direct and indirect economic costs' of regulations but not to quantify benefits (consumer protection, fraud prevention, market stability), the review framework is asymmetrical and favors cost-reduction narratives.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
commercial banks; investment banks; financial services firms