Congress quietly repeals lending discrimination data collection
H.R. 976 — 1071 Repeal to Protect Small Business Lending Act · Filed by Roger Williams (R-TX) · 52 cosponsors · Introduced Feb 4, 2025 · Reported out
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill repeals Section 704B of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which requires banks and lenders to collect and report data on small business loans (including applicant race, ethnicity, and gender). The bill removes these data-collection mandates, arguing they impose compliance costs on financial institutions—especially smaller ones like community banks—and may reduce credit access. The stated intent is to reduce regulatory burden on lenders.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is the repeal of a data-collection and reporting mandate. While framed as burden-reduction for lenders, the functional effect is the elimination of a transparency requirement designed to detect and deter lending discrimination. This is deregulation in the form of a transparency rollback.
What the text implies
- Eliminates the primary federal data source for detecting racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in small-business lending. Without this data, regulators and researchers cannot measure disparities or enforce fair-lending laws effectively.
- Shifts the burden of proof in discrimination cases: without systematic data, individual small-business owners must prove discrimination through costly litigation rather than relying on statistical evidence of patterns.
The full analysis lists 4 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
community banks; credit unions; regional and smaller financial institutions