Community banks want relief, crypto wants clarity, and consumers want protection from a watchdog whose funding keeps getting cut — can banking regulation serve all three without picking winners?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Real relief for small banks is fine — as long as it doesn't become cover for weakening big-bank capital rules. Community banks provide vital credit access in rural and underserved areas, and easing overly burdensome capital rules for genuinely small institutions makes sense. But relief aimed at community banks shouldn't become a template for weakening capital standards at large, systemically important banks under the same "tailoring" banner.
Scaling requirements to size and risk, not applying one rule to every bank, is broadly agreed on. There is broad agreement that capital and reporting requirements should scale with an institution's size and risk profile rather than apply identically to a $500 million rural bank and a trillion-dollar national one. Phased-in capital standards for newly chartered banks and a lower leverage ratio for rural community banks are low-risk, targeted fixes.
Regulatory complexity has all but frozen new bank formation, starving small communities of local lenders. Banking regulation has grown so complex that only a handful of new bank charters are approved most years, starving small businesses and rural communities of local lending relationships. Tailoring capital rules to institution size and streamlining new-bank formation is overdue deregulation, not risk-taking.
Banks need to keep real risk-management discretion, or a fair-access mandate could force them to serve anyone. Banks should retain the ability to manage their own risk, including declining to serve industries they've assessed as high-risk based on documented, quantifiable factors. A blanket "fair access" mandate risks forcing banks to serve payday lenders, gun dealers, or other industries regardless of legitimate risk-management judgment.
Political debanking should be off-limits, but genuine risk-based discretion should stay intact. Banks shouldn't be able to deny services based solely on political or reputational disapproval of an otherwise lawful business, but they should retain discretion based on documented, individualized, risk-based standards. Requiring written justification for any denial is a reasonable middle path between the two extremes.
Losing your bank account because regulators dislike your industry is a real abuse of power, not a hypothetical. "Operation Choke Point"-style debanking of lawful businesses — firearms dealers, cryptocurrency firms, politically disfavored nonprofits — for purely political or reputational reasons is a serious abuse of banks' privileged position in the financial system. It needs a real remedy, including giving affected businesses the ability to sue.
A stablecoin is only as solid as its reserves, and the current capital rules don't require much. The GENIUS Act's light-touch capital rules leave stablecoin holders more exposed than bank depositors, and history — Tether's opacity, the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank scare that hit Circle's reserves — shows stablecoins haven't proven to be all that stable. Capital and reserve requirements should be tightened before stablecoins scale further into everyday payments.
The framework itself was a real bipartisan win; the open question is whether implementation has real teeth. The GENIUS Act's basic framework — federal chartering, mandatory reserve backing, bankruptcy-code priority for holders' claims — was a genuine bipartisan achievement. The open question is implementation: whether the OCC's tailored capital approach ends up meaningfully protective or just light enough to invite undercapitalized entrants.
Tailored rules, not legacy bank-style mandates, are what keep this innovation onshore and regulated. The GENIUS Act rightly avoids imposing legacy bank-style capital mandates that would push U.S. stablecoin activity offshore. Tailoring requirements to a stablecoin issuer's actual business model, rather than treating it like a full-service bank, is the right way to keep this innovation onshore and regulated.
Even while courts block the administration's funding argument, the CFPB is being hollowed out from the inside. Two federal judges have now rejected the administration's argument that the Federal Reserve has no "combined earnings" available to fund the CFPB, but the agency told staff in July 2026 that declining a forced geographic reassignment would mean separation — a parallel track to shrink the agency regardless of how the funding fight in court comes out. The CFPB's July 2026 regulatory agenda continues a deliberate shift toward deregulation and reduced supervision, on top of an agency that has already returned more than $21 billion to defrauded consumers.
Whether or not the CFPB should be pared back, a nominee facing court-ordered oversight of the very cuts he'd run is an unusual position to confirm someone into. Brian Johnson's nomination to lead the CFPB comes with a district judge ruling that he would get 60 days to review the agency's workforce-reduction plan if confirmed by the Senate. Members who favor real oversight of the CFPB's structure and members who want to preserve it should both prefer that changes of this scale go through Congress and confirmed leadership, not staff reassignment deadlines set before a director is even seated.
A confirmed director reviewing the agency's own restructuring, with courts still weighing in, is exactly how this should get sorted out. The CFPB's Dodd-Frank funding structure — drawing directly from the Federal Reserve with no congressional appropriation — was designed specifically to insulate it from democratic accountability, and Congress already cut the statutory funding cap nearly in half. A confirmed director like Brian Johnson reviewing the workforce, alongside the CFPB's July 2026 deregulatory agenda moving forward, are both steps toward bringing the agency's operations back under ordinary accountability.
Interchange fees act like a hidden tax, and a working debit-card model for routing competition already exists. Interchange fees function as a hidden tax passed to consumers through higher retail prices, and the two dominant card networks have blocked competing routing options for over a decade. The Credit Card Competition Act's mandate for a second, non-Visa/Mastercard routing option follows the model that already works for debit cards.
The debit-card model has worked, but credit cards bundle rewards and fraud protection in ways that make a blanket mandate riskier. Routing competition has worked reasonably well for debit cards since the Durbin Amendment, but extending the same mandate to credit cards is a bigger and riskier lift, since credit card rewards and fraud-protection features are more tightly bundled with network exclusivity. A narrow pilot would be worth trying before committing to a blanket mandate.
There's no solid evidence this would lower consumer prices rather than just shift profits between banks and retailers. Mandating routing competition on credit cards risks gutting the rewards programs and fraud-protection investment that come from network exclusivity. There's no solid evidence it would lower prices for consumers rather than simply shift profit margins between banks and large retailers.