Trump CFPB Closes Probes Targeting Unintentional Racial Bias (1)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has closed all fair lending investigations that were based on statistical reviews of credit patterns and will turn its attention to “debanking” and instances of intentional discrimination heading into 2026, the agency said.

“Going forward, the CFPB is focusing its fair lending supervisory and enforcement resources on matters with direct evidence of intentional racial discrimination and identified victims,” the CFPB said in a report released Tuesday outlining the agency’s fair lending activity last year.

The fair lending report explicitly details the CFPB’s efforts under acting Director Russell Vought to roll back disparate impact reviews targeting unintentional bias.

Vought in a separate report released Monday said the CFPB under his helm has been responding to “overreach” by Biden-era Director Rohit Chopra.

“Under his leadership, the Bureau regularly engaged in an overreach of its statutory mandates via punishment of disfavored industries,” Vought said in the introduction to the CFPB’s latest semiannual report. “This overreach and weaponization of the government manifested especially clearly in burdensome regulations and guidance and in investigations and cases that the Bureau initiated.”

Vought’s CFPB is now moving to eliminate the use of disparate impact theory under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, while the agency’s enforcement unit has almost entirely stopped functioning, filing only one enforcement action since Vought took over in February.

The CFPB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Along with focusing on intentional discrimination, the CFPB said in the fair lending report that it will continue to probe what the Trump administration says is a pattern of banks denying services to customers that ran afoul of Biden-era policies on guns, payday lending, and energy production or for religious reasons.

“In 2025 and beyond, the CFPB will be working only on areas clearly within its statutory authority, prioritizing pressing threats to consumers, focusing on actual fraud against consumers, where there are identifiable victims with material and measurable consumer damages, and redressing tangible harm by getting money back directly to consumers,” the fair lending report said.

The CFPB’s new fair lending enforcement priorities are in line with a series of executive orders President Donald Trump signed this year, the agency said.

The dropped investigations and examinations also come as the CFPB faces a funding crunch imposed by the Trump administration that could force the agency to shut down early next year.

Consumer advocates and Democratic state attorneys general warn that the CFPB’s turn away from disparate impact will allow unintentional discrimination to flourish, particularly as lenders use artificial intelligence to make credit decisions. Without reviewing lending outcomes, it will be nearly impossible to root out discriminatory lending practices, they say.