The House Financial Services Committee is aiming to roll back the mistakes of Dodd-Frank with legislative proposals that rein in the power of regulators to devise burdensome and arbitrary oversight rules for banks.
These proposed reforms to the financial sector will cut red tape and deregulate the economy, benefiting consumers and businesses alike.
The committee’s proposals build upon the precedent set by Congress in to 2018 that acknowledges the mistakes of Dodd-Frank through the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S.2155), which tailored bank regulations by size rather than forcing the entire financial sector to comply with a one-size-fits-all approach to examinations and balance sheet constraints.
These efforts can be seen in a slate of new bills released for markup in December of last year that are listed below:
H.R 6544 (REVIEW Act)
The Regulatory Efficiency, Verification, Itemization, and Enhanced Workflow Act of 2025, or the REVIEW Act, would require federal banking agencies to review their regulatory practices every five years, rather than every ten, to identify, eliminate, and streamline regulations. The aim of the bill is to force federal regulators to assess the cumulative impact that existing regulations impose on consumers and banks through a retrospective cost/benefit analysis. This bill would strengthen regulator accountability by accelerating the internal review cycle and forcing agencies to justify existing rulemakings to assess whether they are proportionate to their economic costs.
H.R 6550 (American FIRST Act)
The American Financial Institution Regulatory Sovereignty and Transparency Act of 2025, or American FIRST Act, would require federal banking agencies to disclose their interactions with foreign regulators. The bill would require agencies such as the Fed, OCC, and FDIC to file annual reports detailing their interactions with global financial regulatory or supervisory entities. It would require agencies to disclose the forums at which they maintain membership and identify the organization’s goals, sources of funding, and require disclosure of any regulatory guidance or texts produced at meetings. Rulemakings that take inspiration from foreign actors would have to clearly identify as such if proposed by federal agencies.
The need for this legislation is best understood in the context of the arbitrary Basel III endgame proposal issued by the Federal Reserve in 2023. The rulemaking would have placed U.S. banks at a competitive disadvantage by gold-plating regulations related to leverage and other balance sheet constraints. ATR’s own Bryan Bashur testified on Basel III’s arbitrariness by highlighting how the proposal held no basis in existing statute and that U.S. regulators never disclosed any of their meetings or interactions with the Basel Committee in formulating and implementing the regulatory framework. The lack of accountability and transparency to the American public and Congress contravened the spirit of S.2155 in 2018, when Congress affirmed that financial regulation must be tailored to bank size and avoid unnecessarily burdening financial institutions through heavy-handed mandates.
H.R 6553 (TIER Act)
The Tailoring and Indexing Enhanced Regulations Act, or TIER Act, seeks to update thresholds for bank supervision and reporting that have gone unchanged since Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010. Dodd-Frank granted the Federal Reserve broad supervisory authority. The Fed is allowed by statute to review and either approve or reject bank mergers for institutions above certain asset thresholds. The Fed can also direct large institutions to terminate certain commercial activities or restrict a bank’s ability to offer a financial product or service if the board deems such an action necessary. Under the TIER Act, asset thresholds would be increased so more banks can be exempted from these excessive provisions. The threshold increases would also be permanently indexed to GDP growth, preventing banks from being pulled into stricter supervisory regimes due to nominal balance sheet growth.
The TIER Act reinforces Congress’s intent, expressed in S.2155, that bank regulation should be tailored to bank size and avoid one-size-fits-all mandates. The bill promotes a more disciplined supervisory framework that allows banks to focus resources on serving customers and supporting economic growth.
Americans for Tax Reform urges lawmakers to support these bills and prioritize modernizing bank regulations to enhance the competitiveness of the financial sector so banks can continue to serve as a pillar of economic growth and serve their customers better without passing on needless regulatory costs.
