FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, Sept 1 –
Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould and the FDIC
are proposing to raise the asset threshold for full
Community Reinvestment Act compliance from $1.6 billion
to $10 billion — moving hundreds of banks out of
"large bank" status and the full lending and investment
scrutiny that comes with it. They have other attacks on
the CRA - and, as it turns out, on FOIA;
Inner City Press reported on their
CRA attack plan back on July 22. Then Comptroller Gould
has gave an "exclusive" interview about "dropping" the
proposed regulation which "delivers significant regulatory
relief to community banks. It raises the asset threshold
defining a “small bank†to $1 billion, up from $412
million. The threshold for “intermediate banks†will rise
to $10 billion from $1.65 billion."
Fair Finance Watch has commented on bank
mergers spanning nearly this entire range this year. Laid
side by side, they show something reporting on a single
proposed number can't: banks are not clustered at either
extreme. They are spread across the whole spectrum the
rulemaking would redraw, and at least one sits precisely
where a rule change would newly exempt it from scrutiny it
faces today. See below.
Meanwhile, the FDIC and OCC have separately
proposed rewriting their own information-disclosure rules
— and the pattern across all three proposals is the same.
Banks get more room; the public gets none. Both
disclosure proposals would let banks share confidential
supervisory information internally, with affiliates and
parent companies, without prior agency sign-off. Fair
Finance Watch's comment to the FDIC, filed this week,
cited the agency's own recent conduct as the reason more
speed is needed in the other direction: during the public
comment period on OppFi Inc.'s pending acquisition of
BNCCORP, the FDIC's own comment portal malfunctioned,
rejecting submissions by falsely claiming an over-10MB
attachment had been included when none had, and FFW's FOIA
request in the same matter, after being denied expedited
processing and then granted it on appeal, has still not
been acted on.
FFW's comment to the OCC, whose parallel
proposal is not yet formally published, makes a related
but distinct point: the OCC's own proposed rule touts an
"expedited process for FOIA requests" as a headline
feature, yet FFW's actual experience in the OppFi matter
was the opposite — an initial denial, followed by
expedited treatment granted only after FFW submitted a
formal certification addressing the D.C. Circuit's
Al-Fayed factors, days consumed on a comment period
already running. And there is a smaller, pointed
detail in the OCC proposal worth its own line: the
notice's list of ways to submit a comment includes the
Federal eRulemaking Portal, mail, and hand delivery — but
not email, despite an OCC email comment address in active
use across the agency's rulemakings for over a decade. A
rule about how OCC information is made available to the
public omits the OCC's own easiest channel for the public
to weigh in on it. Fair Finance Watch has asked the OCC to
fix that before finalizing anything else.
And, Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch
has submitted formal FOIA requests about the CRA attacks
to both the FDIC and OCC, with only the FDIC for now
acknowledging receipt (the OCC is increasingly a lawless
backwater) "08/02/2026 Dear Matthew Lee: Your
Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act request has been
received by the FDIC’s FOIA/Privacy Act Group and assigned
Log Number 2026-FDIC-FOIA-01809. Please be advised that
the FOIA allows 20 business days from date of receipt to
process your request, and additional processing time is
allowed under certain circumstances." Wonder what those
circumstances would / will be....
We'll have more on this.
It must be noted that the
current leadership of the FDIC and OCC are already gutting
CRA. The FDIC dispensed with public notice of branch
applications, the very basis of CRA. See, Sept 10, 2025,
American Banker, BankThink: "The FDIC is taking the
'community' out of CRA enforcement," by Matthew R. Lee, here.
The OCC has allowed crypto firms into bank, and not answer
on how fintechs evade CRA.
The FDIC's own July 31, 2026 Board Memorandum — the document recommending the rule's approval — names its author and its concurring official by name: Benjamin K. Olson, Director of the Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection, and General Counsel Matthew P. Reed.
Inner City Press while noting FDIC Chair Hill's recent statements on CRA handed the FDIC those two names, along with the rule's own docket number, as a ready-made search path. Whether that satisfies the agency's stated concern remains to be seen. There is a pattern worth naming plainly. An agency moving to weaken a forty-nine-year-old law requiring banks to serve the communities that fund them,, is also the agency now asking the public to wait, and to be more specific, before it will explain where that claim came from. The comment period on the rule itself does not pause for FOIA processing.
On September 1, the FDIC sent a strange update:
Dear Matthew Lee,
We conducted a search for records responsive to Items 4 through 7 of your request and identified the results outlined below. Please advise if you would like us to proceed with the review and processing of the potentially responsive records.
|
Term |
Hits |
|
"RIN 3064-AG31" |
322 |
|
"RIN 3064-AG31" AND "Community Reinvement Act" |
322 |
|
"buy regulatory favor" |
17 |
"Community Reinvement Act"? Not surprising that typo did
not add any records to RIN 2064-AG31. Inner City Press
wrote back:
Thank you for this. Before confirming, a few questions:
First, I'd like to confirm the search functioned as intended: "RIN 3064-AG31" AND "Community Reinvement Act" [sic, matching your search term] returned the identical 322 hits as "RIN 3064-AG31" alone. Could you confirm whether the AND operator is filtering results, or whether this indicates a search issue?
Second, Items 5 and 6 of my request concern communications with specific categories of outside parties — banking trade associations and community/consumer organizations — not only documents referencing the rule by its RIN number. Could you also run a search using the names of major banking trade associations and community/consumer advocacy organizations, so that correspondence which doesn't cite the RIN explicitly is captured as well?
Third, given the volume, I'd ask that the 17 hits for "buy regulatory favor" — the smallest and most specific set, tied directly to Item 4 — be prioritized for review and produced first, on a rolling basis, rather than waiting for the full 322-document set to be processed together.
With those
clarifications, yes, please proceed." But by where?
Watch this site.
