Sponsors (15)
The bill increases public, aggregate data to reveal lending disparities and protects borrower privacy while reducing compliance costs and uncertainty for Farm Credit institutions — trading stronger transparency and targeted oversight against privacy limits, potential cost-shifts to borrowers, and weaker or uneven consumer protections.
Small farmers and agricultural borrowers will have demographic (race/sex/ethnicity) lending data collected and published in aggregated form, enabling identification of lending disparities and supporting targeted oversight or policy responses.
The public release of aggregated FCS lending data increases transparency of lending patterns in rural and agricultural markets, which can inform policymakers, advocates, and communities.
Borrower privacy is protected by prohibiting the Farm Credit Administration from requiring inferred race/sex/ethnicity when an applicant declines to self-identify and by banning disclosure of personally identifiable information in public reports.
Borrowers (especially small farmers and other rural customers) could lose consumer protections or remedies because FCA‑supervised lenders are exempted from the specified ECOA subsection and may not be held to the same CFPB standard as other lenders.
FCS institutions will incur administrative costs to collect, maintain, and report demographic data, and those costs could be passed on to borrowers through higher fees or reduced services.
Data quality and privacy limits—because some applicants may decline to self‑identify and because aggregated data in small communities can risk re‑identification—may reduce the usefulness of the demographic data and leave residual privacy risks for rural borrowers.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Introduced February 6, 2025 by Brad Finstad · Last progress February 6, 2025
Requires lenders in the Farm Credit System to ask small‑farmer loan applicants and borrowers to self‑report race, sex, and ethnicity, and to send annual, aggregated reports of that data to the Farm Credit Administration (FCA) for public release. It bars lenders and the FCA from inferring or publishing anyone’s personally identifiable information, delays the rule’s start for one year after enactment, and makes the requirement contingent on a related consumer‑data rule remaining in effect. Also narrows one part of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act by expressly excluding entities supervised by the FCA from that specific provision. No new funding or new agencies are created by the bill.