By Douglas Gillison
(Reuters) -The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a list on Friday of nearly 70 policy and regulatory guidance documents stretching back more than a decade that the agency plans to rescind.
The announcement, which was not final, was the latest step in the administration’s radical reorientation of the CFPB’s work under President Donald Trump.
The agency, created after the 2008 financial crisis to serve as a watchdog for American consumers against predatory business practices, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The documents rescinded provided policy and guidance oversight on matters as varied as debt collections in nursing homes, supervision of companies offering financial services to military servicemembers, discrimination in lending based on gender and sexual orientation and the publication of consumer complaint data. Some were policies and guidance issued under the prior Trump administration.
In a notice posted Friday to the Federal Register’s website, acting CFPB Director Russell Vought said the policy documents — which offer interpretations of existing law and announce bureau priorities — sometimes imposed illegal requirements on companies or simply increased the regulatory burden unnecessarily.
Even where guidance documents were not necessarily improper, “it is the Bureau’s current policy to avoid issuing guidance except where necessary and where compliance burdens would be reduced rather than increased,” Vought said.
Republicans have long charged that the CFPB used such policy documents to avoid issuing regulations subject to public comment and legal challenges.
The decision to scrap them is not yet final but the bureau will not enforce them during a pending review, according to Vought.
Before Trump fired former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in February, the agency released a compendium of its guidance documents, noting that under a Supreme Court decision last year, courts, and not federal agencies, will have the final say in how arcane regulatory laws must be interpreted.
Both Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk had earlier said the CFPB should be eliminated altogether, accusing prior leadership of politicized enforcement.
The agency’s defenders have said it performs vital services and charged that Musk’s involvement in attempts to shut it down through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency constitute a major conflict of interest, given Musk’s plans to enter the financial services sector.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison; editing by Pete Schroeder and Aurora Ellis)
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