House-Passed Appropriations Bill Includes Significant Dodd-Frank Reforms

The House passed a series of appropriation bills along party lines late Thursday deviating somewhat from President Trump’s original budget proposal, but also comprising some major changes over the last fiscal year. The financial services bill incorporated many of the measures found in CHOICE Act 2.0, a Republican proposal to alter consumer protection and banking regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act.

In particular, the financial services bill targets the unchecked powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The House bill would bring the CFPB under Congressional appropriations, eliminate the agency’s supervisory authority, ban the CFPB from regulating small-dollar credit, repeal the arbitration rule, and takes away its UDAAP authority. An amendment by Rep. Keith Ellison (D- MN) that would have removed most of the CHOICE Act’s language from the appropriations bill failed.

The appropriations process will now move to the Senate. The Senate has already passed 10 of the 12 spending bills in committees, but none have come to the floor for a full vote. Even as some in Washington are looking across the aisle to keep the government moving forward, others are pursuing alternative means to press their agenda. Sen. Ted Cruz (R- TX) sought earlier this week to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act through the use of the budget reconciliation process, a measure that would require a simple majority vote to pass and would avoid a filibuster by the opposition. Sen. Cruz introduced a bill this past spring to abolish the CFPB, but that bill has yet to gain traction in Congress.