Sponsors (16)
The bill reduces reporting burdens to speed lending and lower costs for small businesses and community lenders, but it significantly reduces transparency and oversight needed to detect discrimination and enforce fair-lending protections, risking harm to underserved borrowers and policymaking.
Small-business owners will face less paperwork and fewer reporting hurdles when applying for loans, making it faster and easier to obtain credit.
Community banks and credit unions will have lower compliance costs, freeing resources that can be used for lending or other services benefiting local businesses.
Financial institutions may face reduced administrative burdens, which could modestly lower borrowing costs for some consumers and businesses over time.
Small-business owners and the public will lose transparency into lending patterns, making it harder to detect discrimination or redlining in small-business lending.
Policymakers, regulators, and researchers will have less data to monitor credit access and target programs, weakening oversight of lenders and evidence-based policymaking.
Minority- and women-owned businesses could face reduced protection and enforcement of fair-lending laws, risking worsened access to credit for historically underserved groups.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Removes the federal requirement that lenders collect and report standardized small‑business loan applicant and demographic data and deletes the related statutory text.
Introduced February 12, 2025 by John Neely Kennedy · Last progress February 12, 2025
Repeals the federal requirement that lenders collect and report demographic and loan-application data for small-business credit under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. It removes the statutory text that created the collection requirement and makes conforming edits to the Act's table-of-contents and statutory structure. The bill is intended to reduce compliance costs for lenders—particularly smaller banks and credit unions—by eliminating the reporting burden. It also ends the flow of standardized data that regulators, civil-rights enforcers, and researchers use to monitor small-business lending patterns and possible discrimination.