Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Notable · Needs Congress

Bar CFPB enforcement not grounded in APA-compliant rulemaking

Attempted

839 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Require that no CFPB funds are spent on enforcement actions that are not based on a rulemaking that complies with the Administrative Procedure Act.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The CFPB withdrew, in one notice, some sixty-seven guidance documents — eight policy statements, seven interpretive rules, thirteen advisory opinions and thirty-nine circulars and bulletins — and stated that the withdrawn guidance "should not be enforced or otherwise relied upon by the Bureau". The notice grounds itself in the Administrative Procedure Act, saying agencies "should impose legally binding requirements on the public only through regulations", and records the Acting Director's memorandum of 2025-04-11 prohibiting improper use of guidance. **What that memorandum does has now been established (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06), and it is the narrower of the two readings.** The Bureau's own Guidance page says the memorandum is *internal*, and that it prohibits "improper use of guidance by the CFPB" while "directing a review of all guidance material previously produced"; the withdrawal notice says the same from the other side, that the Acting Director "instructed Bureau components to identify and review all guidance material previously produced and flag for retention guidance documents that conform to the principles set out in my separate April 11 memorandum on guidance". It restricts what guidance the Bureau issues and keeps, not what it may sue on. Nowhere does it direct that no enforcement action be brought except on an APA-compliant rule, which is the Quote's substance. So the stronger reading is unavailable and the weaker one is confirmed - either way `attempted`, because the Quote asks Congress for an appropriations restriction. Two earlier announcements had already deprioritized enforcement resting on particular guidance: the section 1071 rule (2025-04-30) and the Buy Now, Pay Later interpretive rule (2025-05-06). All of this is Bureau policy, revocable by the next Director; the Quote asks Congress for a spending restriction, and no such restriction has been enacted or voted on. The only CFPB provision in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75 § 746) requires the Bureau to publish its Federal Reserve funding requests, which is a different thing.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The withdrawal notice was read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-05-12/html/2025-08286.htm (loaded 2026-09-01). Its section III is the itemized list of withdrawn documents; its section I carries the Acting Director’s statement of the APA principle and the reference to the April 11, 2025 memorandum.
  • The memorandum itself is internal and is not published (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). The Bureau’s Guidance page (consumerfinance.gov/compliance/guidance/) describes it in terms — “an internal memorandum prohibiting improper use of guidance by the CFPB and directing a review of all guidance material previously produced” — which is as close as an allowlisted source gets to its contents, and is enough to answer the question the read-queue row asked. The document is a lead; the Bureau’s description of it is Evidence.
  • consumerfinance.gov/search/?q= is a stripped query and must not be trusted. It reports “2372 Search results” for guidance and the identical 2372 for the nonsense control zzzqqxnonsense. The sitemap sweep recorded on 2026-09-01 and the section indexes (/compliance/guidance/, /compliance/withdrawn-guidance/, /rules-policy/final-rules/, /about-us/newsroom/) are the routes that work; all open to a bare curl.
  • Why this is attempted and not partial: the ask is a funding restriction that only Congress can impose, and executive action that routes around a requires-Congress ask without eliminating the target is attempted. Nothing here removes the Bureau’s statutory authority to bring an enforcement action without a prior rule; it is a policy of not doing so, and the notice says explicitly that “withdrawal is not necessarily final”.
  • Congress moved in the other direction once: S.J.Res. 147 would have disapproved the Bureau’s withdrawal of one of these documents, the abusiveness policy statement; the Senate rejected the motion to proceed on 2026-05-13, so the withdrawal stands (see #2183).
  • consumerfinance.gov is fully readable to a browser User-Agent, and its newsroom RSS feed (/about-us/newsroom/feed/) is a complete, correctly dated list of the twenty-one press releases the Bureau has issued since 2025-02-03. That is where both press-release dates above come from; the page bodies carry only a “Page last modified” stamp, which for the 1071 announcement is a week later than its publication date.
Action
restrict
Object
CFPB enforcement actions not based on APA rulemaking
ID
2181