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

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor · Needs Congress

Send unused CFPB civil penalty funds to the Treasury

Attempted

839 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Ensure that any civil penalty funds not used to recompense wronged consumers go to the Department of the Treasury. The funds should not be retained by the Bureau to be dispensed at the pleasure of the Director—potentially to political actors.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The CFPB proposed to amend its 2013 Civil Penalty Fund rule (12 CFR part 1075) to strike every provision letting the Fund Administrator allocate leftover money to consumer education and financial literacy programs, saying the existing procedures gave "neither adequate guardrails for the agency's exercise of its discretion nor adequate transparency to the public". That reaches the Quote's second sentence — the discretionary spending the Mandate objects to — but not its first: the statute, 12 U.S.C. 5497(d), keeps the money in the Fund at the Federal Reserve, and only Congress could redirect it to the Treasury. The proposal has not been finalized: no Civil Penalty Fund rule appears in the CFPB's Federal Register output through 2026-09-01, and the Bureau's 2026 Regulatory Agenda, current as of 2026-01-13, carries no entry for it.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The proposal was read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-06-18/html/2025-11248.htm (loaded 2026-09-01). It would rescind 12 CFR 1075.100, 1075.105(a), 1075.106(d)(2) and 1075.107(a) so far as they concern allocations to consumer education and financial literacy programs. Nothing in it sends money to the Treasury, and it does not purport to.
  • A Federal Register full-text search for “Civil Penalty Fund” restricted to the CFPB and to documents published on or after 2025-01-20 returns two records: this proposal and a Privacy Act system-of-records notice (2025-12-22). There is no final rule.
  • Congress touched CFPB funding once in the window, and not on this: section 746 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75, enacted 2026-02-03) requires the Bureau to notify the appropriations and banking committees, and to post publicly, each request to transfer funds from the Federal Reserve under Dodd-Frank section 1017. That is a transparency condition on the Bureau’s funding draw, not a redirection of penalty receipts, and is recorded here rather than as Evidence.
  • No 119th-Congress bill in the corpus addresses the Civil Penalty Fund.
  • Boundary call: the alternative reading is not started, on the ground that removing a discretionary spending channel is not sending unused money to the Treasury. It is recorded in the spot-check register.
Action
transfer
Object
the CFPB Civil Penalty Fund
ID
2179