How CFPB Rulemaking Shifted In 2025

CFPB rulemaking in 2025 shifted from an expansive, aggressive agenda toward a more restrained, deregulatory, and procedurally focused program under new leadership aligned with the Trump Administration.

Overall shift in 2025

• Regulatory volume dropped, with far fewer final rules and enforcement actions than in 2024, and more emphasis on rescinding, revising, or pausing prior initiatives.

• The Bureau’s stated priority moved from pushing the boundaries of its authority to “recalibrating” existing frameworks, reducing burdens, and tightening its actions to clear statutory mandates.

Agenda and priorities

• The Spring/Summer 2025 Unified Agenda emphasized reconsidering recently completed rulemakings, scaling back several high‑profile rules, and adding only limited new initiatives.

• Priorities included: revisiting open banking/personal financial data rights, narrowing small‑business lending data rules, revising ECOA/Regulation B standards, and raising “larger participant” thresholds so supervision focuses on firms with the most consumer interaction.

Procedural and structural changes

• The CFPB moved to rescind or revise its Rules of Practice for adjudication, shifting decision‑making power back from the Director to more neutral hearing officers/ALJs and undoing 2022–23 changes that had centralized authority.

• It also launched or proposed procedures for periodic review of existing regulations and for guidance documents, signaling a more formal, self‑limiting process for future rulemakings.

Substantive deregulatory moves

• Nonbank registry: The Bureau deprioritized enforcement of the nonbank registry rule and moved to rescind it, citing high regulatory burden and limited marginal consumer benefit.

• BNPL and product‑specific rules: It withdrew the prior interpretive rule treating “buy now, pay later” products as credit cards under TILA, backing away from imposing full credit‑card‑style requirements on BNPL providers.​

• COVID‑era mortgage rules: The CFPB rescinded temporary RESPA/Reg X COVID‑19 mortgage servicing protections, arguing they no longer served a meaningful purpose post‑pandemic.

Fair lending, ECOA, and data‑collection re‑scoping

• ECOA/Regulation B: New proposals aimed to narrow disparate‑impact theories, clarify discouragement standards, and tighten criteria for Special Purpose Credit Programs, in line with an executive‑branch push toward “merit‑based opportunity” and away from disparate‑impact liability.

• Section 1071 (small‑business lending data): The CFPB began a “redo” to narrow coverage, raise volume thresholds, streamline data fields, remove several discretionary data points (including LGBTQI+ status), and extend compliance deadlines, explicitly to reduce burden on smaller lenders.