House Republicans announced they may seek to reverse a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule giving the agency oversight of Big Tech’s ventures into digital payments and prevent it from creating similar rules in the future.
The GOP’s move would be a giveaway to Big Tech giants including Apple and Google, non-banking companies with payment apps that would come under the CFPB’s supervision. It would also be a boon to Elon Musk’s X, which announced it will roll out X Money this year, with digital payments features like peer-to-peer transfers and instant bank transfers.
Last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) released a list of 10 federal rules that Republicans are “prioritizing as potential targets” to roll back using Congressional Review Act (CRA) procedures. The CRA enables Congress to reverse agency rules by passing joint resolutions of disapproval within 60 legislative days of a rule being finalized, and getting the president to sign the reversal into law. When a CRA resolution is enacted, the disapproved rule “shall not take effect (or continue)”—and more than that, the agency that created the rule is barred from issuing a rule in “substantially the same form,” unless it is specifically authorized to do so in a later law.
