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The House of Representatives passed resolutions Wednesday that will nullify two Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rules. As a result, low-income customers will pay an estimated $5 billion more annually in overdraft fees, and Big Tech will get to pursue its ambitions to make payment apps and other financial services products with little regulatory oversight.
The resolutions, which have already passed the Senate and will now head to President Trump, use the powers under the Congressional Review Act to reverse regulatory actions taken by executive branch agencies submitted after a certain date. Once passed, the CRA resolutions both nullify the rule and prevent agencies from taking “substantially similar” actions in the future. President Trump signed 16 CRA resolutions in his first term, and two so far in 2025.
The overdraft fee rule would have capped the fees, charged when customers attempt to withdraw more from their account than they have deposited, to $5. The average overdraft fee is closer to $35. The so-called “larger participant” rule gave the CFPB supervisory authority over non-banks engaged in digital payment app transactions, including companies like Elon Musk’s X, which has eagerly moved toward developing a financial services app.
All House Republicans decided to reveal themselves as objectively pro-junk fee in supporting blocking the overdraft fee rule; only Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) voted against the larger participant rule. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) voted against both resolutions in the Senate, but no other Senate Republican did.
The overdraft fee rule was predicted to save Americans $5 billion per year, weighted overwhelmingly to poorer bank customers who are at risk of overdrawing their accounts. Bank lobbyists were unsurprisingly cited as the primary endorsers of killing the rule. For years, banks have been found to structure payments to generate more money from overdraft fees.
Republicans have justified overturning the overdraft fee rule by saying they want to protect consumer choice, an old fallacy that banks have to rip off their customers or they cannot survive. Yet former CFPB director Rohit Chopra’s pressure on larger banks led to many dropping their overdraft fees entirely.
Now, the seal of approval from Congress to charge whatever price for overdrawing accounts could reverse that trend, while allowing those smaller banks that maintained the practice to continue. Arvest Bank, owned by the Walton family of Walmart fame, made 124 percent of their net income in 2024 from overdraft fees; they had filed a lawsuit to nullify the rule.
The larger participant rule was a response to the growing trend of tech firms devising apps to help people store or move their money. Under the rule, the CFPB could add new companies to their roster for enhanced supervision, and send in examiners to monitor their services. The agency had added Google to that roster in December.
The CFPB can still enforce laws around deceptive or unfair conduct, or violations of various consumer protection laws, against Big Tech firms, as it has done previously against Apple and the payment app Zelle. (Under Russ Vought, the CFPB recently dropped the Zelle case.) But there would be no way to send agency examiners into X or other tech firms to study their payment services, which would make it harder to identify scams and force compliance.
An effort from Laura Loomer to associate the payment app rule with debanking, on the grounds that lack of supervision of payment apps means those companies could block anyone from them, ended up going nowhere with House Republicans.
Early in Trump’s term, his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who was briefly in charge of the CFPB, belatedly added an order specifically preventing new large participants from being chosen for supervision under the rule. That showed how preoccupied the administration was with this rule, which happens to affect Musk’s business operations.
Banks, meanwhile, favored adding supervision to non-bank payment apps. So it’s natural to have paired these two resolutions together. The banks get relief from the cap on overdraft fees, and the non-banks don’t have to worry about heightened scrutiny of their payment apps.
Congress has until mid-May to act on CRA resolutions.
The CFPB has improbably stayed alive, despite Vought’s attempts to destroy the agency entirely. The Trump administration is under a preliminary injunction preventing the firing of CFPB workers and requiring the continued operation of statutory functions. But CFPB examiners have claimed that they have not been allowed to review financial institutions for compliance, suggesting that Vought is still trying to hobble the agency.
Now, examiners won’t get to supervise payment apps from non-banks, thanks to Congress. And whenever normal functioning returns to the CFPB, critical gaps will have been blown open in the mission to protect consumers.
