SOUTH BRONX / SDNY, Sept 17 – The FDIC's
three-person Board voted on September 17 on new merger
rules to, in their own words, "reduce[] public notice and
comment period requirements." This follows the FDIC's
lawless elimination of public notice of branch
applications in September 2025. See, Sept 10, 2025,
American Banker, BankThink: "The
FDIC is taking the 'community' out of CRA enforcement,"
here.
In the September 17 proposal, a "letter
filing" process would offer "deemed approval" for whole
categories of mergers the agency now calls "de minimis."
There would be new limits on the FDIC's own discretion to
pull a merger application out of expedited review even
when something in the record suggests it deserves a closer
look. And this is the agency that is supposed to
protect the insurance fund which dates back to the bank
failures of the Great Depression.
The formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,
RIN 3064-AG18, describes the changes as reforms that would
"improve the speed, certainty, and predictability" of
merger review. The FDIC is already notably faster and less
transparent even than the Federal Reserve. They do not
release reasons for their approvals, and they
automatically deny requests for public hearings.
Comments are due sixty days
after the notice is published in the Federal Register — a
date not yet fixed, since the notice itself currently
reads "[INSERT DATE 60 DAYS AFTER DATE OF PUBLICATION IN
THE FEDERAL REGISTER]."
The FDIC has slow-walked and resisted
Inner City Press' Freedom of Information Act request
concerning the joint OCC/FDIC proposal to raise the
Community Reinvestment Act's examination threshold from
$1.6 billion to $10 billion or even $30 billion — the rule
that would exempt
hundreds of mid-sized bank mergers from full CRA
scrutiny entirely.
The FDIC attempted to "abate" the
request as overbroad, and even after search results
confirmed hundreds of responsive records existed,
including internal correspondence discussing the rule's
own justification that low public comment volume "strongly
suggests affected parties have put little value" on
transparency mechanisms — reasoning this outlet has
directly challenged as inverted logic that punishes low
engagement by eliminating the mechanism rather than
improving it.
In a separate merger application, which
Fair Finance Watch has commented on, Isabella Bank
Corporation's confidential exhibits — covering management
interlocks, strategic planning, and integration timelines
— were withheld from FOIA in their entirety, with the
FDIC's own response characterizing a data-backed public
comment as "frivolous" before ultimately failing to rebut
its specific findings on the merits.
Each of these, alone, might be explained as
a routine administrative choice. Together, they describe
an agency moving in one direction: less notice before a
merger, less scrutiny during a merger's review, and less
transparency about its own reasoning for both, at
precisely the moment its sister agency the OCC - whose
Jonathan Gould is one of the three FDIC board members - is
pursuing parallel reductions in CRA oversight. Watch this
site.
