Sponsors (16)
The bill reduces compliance and administrative burdens for small-business lenders—potentially expanding credit and cutting costs—while sacrificing transparency and regulatory data needed to detect and remedy discriminatory lending, increasing risk to underserved borrowers.
Small-business owners and community banks/credit unions face lower compliance and reporting costs, which could increase lenders' capacity to make loans to small firms and improve access to credit.
Banks and credit unions will have reduced administrative burden, freeing staff for customer service and underwriting and simplifying day-to-day operations.
Small businesses may see modestly lower borrowing costs because reduced administrative overhead could be passed through to borrowers.
Small-business borrowers — especially minority- and women-owned firms — lose transparency into lenders' practices and data-driven monitoring, increasing the risk that discriminatory lending will go undetected.
Federal regulators and fair-lending enforcers will have less data to identify and prove discrimination, weakening oversight and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
Underserved communities (rural and urban low-income areas) may face reduced public accountability for lenders and worse access to credit, producing longer-term economic harms if discriminatory patterns persist.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Introduced February 12, 2025 by John Neely Kennedy · Last progress February 12, 2025
Repeals the federal small-business loan data collection and reporting requirement that was added to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act by Dodd‑Frank, eliminating the statutory obligation for covered lenders to collect and report specified data on small business credit applications. It also removes related table-of-contents entries and references in the Dodd‑Frank Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, with no new funding or programs created. The legislation is intended to reduce compliance costs for lenders—particularly smaller banks and credit unions—and to remove what the text describes as a regulatory barrier to small-business credit; it will also end the federal collection of the specific small-business lending data used by regulators and researchers to monitor lending patterns and potential discrimination.