Coalition of 78 Civil Rights Organizations Urges Trump Administration Not to Eliminate Fair Access to Lending for Women, Underserved Communities

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Coalition of 78 Civil Rights Organizations Urges Trump Administration Not to Eliminate Fair Access to Lending for Women, Underserved Communities  

WASHINGTON, D.C. –  A coalition led by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), including dozens of fair housing, civil rights, and consumer advocacy organizations, filed a comment urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) not to finalize a proposed rule that would weaken hard-won fair lending protections for women and limit affordable credit opportunities for underserved communities. The letter submitted by the coalition explained that weakening the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) reverses critically important protections, restricts future business opportunities for thousands of U.S. companies, and acts contrary to Congress’s intent. 

The coalition of 29 national and 49 local organizations explains that the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released by the CFPB would eviscerate longstanding fair lending and consumer protections in three dangerous ways:  

• The proposed rule would eliminate ECOA’s ban on lending practices that disproportionally harm people based on their characteristics and identity, such as gender, race, color, national origin, age, marital status, religion, or because the applicant receives public assistance. For example, ECOA has barred lenders from excluding consideration of the income of parents who are on parental leave, a practice that falls more heavily on women. If the proposed rule is enacted, this means lenders could freely use credit models that unnecessarily exclude everyday people, without any requirement to implement fairer alternatives. The comment also explains that this change would permit algorithmic discrimination, in which models trained on data distorted by past discrimination may recreate these disparities in present day transactions.
• The proposed rule would give banks the green light to engage in redlining practices that deny Black, Latino, and other underserved communities fair access to safe and non-predatory mortgages. For example, this rule change would allow banks to only do business in predominately White neighborhoods, leaving other communities reliant on risky, high-cost lenders that offer predatory loans with exorbitant interest rates, draining hard-earned wealth. The comment submitted explains that, by removing protections for consumers who are shopping for a loan, the proposed rule would allow widespread discrimination in U.S. credit markets. 
• The proposed rule would stop lenders from establishing Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCP), which help financial institutions responsibly lend to more creditworthy borrowers through means such as offering downpayment assistance. These programs are critical to making the American Dream of homeownership accessible to all people. This includes first-generation rural, urban, and suburban residents unable to rely on family members for downpayment assistance because previous generations were wrongfully excluded from federal homeownership programs. The comment explains that SPCPs are critically necessary to fulfill ECOA’s promise and that they expand access to credit to those who have been historically denied it.

NFHA President and CEO Lisa Rice called the proposed rule change “unconscionable” and said it “must never come into effect.” The proposal would weaken existing protections as housing discrimination remains at near-record levels, as documented in NFHA’s recently-released 2025 Fair Housing Trends Report. Instead of responding to the desires of voters to create more affordability, the Trump administration is once again making it costlier for everyday people to afford and access the American Dream. 

ECOA is one of the country’s most important civil rights laws. It was originally passed to ensure that women could fairly obtain credit in their own names without, for example, needing a husband or male relative co-signing a loan. Congress soon expanded its protections to cover other protected classes, with the intent that ECOA would ensure equal credit opportunities for all. The federal agencies charged with implementing it—first the Federal Reserve Board and then, after the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB—promulgated regulations consistent with this expansive intent, but the Trump Administration now proposes to fundamentally weaken these protections. 

The weakening of ECOA, paired with recent actions by the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has undermined the safety of the housing finance system. The FHFA Director recently prohibited the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from supporting SPCPs. These programs provided $82 million in reduced costs to 57,282 borrowers of all races from 2022 to 2024 and helped to generate billions in economic activity. SPCPs also help lenders circumvent systemic barriers that limit credit access for People of Color. An estimated 70 percent of future homebuyers will be Latino and Black. Without access to fair and affordable mortgages for these consumers, the system will fail.   

“The proposed rule changes are a death knell for lenders. Disparate impact is a business-growth engine, and any company that wants to remain viable and competitive will continue to use this critical tool. Disparate impact helps businesses grow and expand their products and services by revealing and removing unnecessary barriers that arbitrarily limit customer reach, suppress innovation, and constrain business opportunities,” said Rice. “The CFPB’s proposal ignores mounds of evidence revealing ongoing lending bias, is an assault on decades of settled fair lending law and would promote discrimination in our credit markets. It is a continuation of this administration’s attack on protections against redlining. For these reasons and more, this rule must never be promulgated.”   

“By eliminating the longstanding ‘effects test’ under the ECOA, this rule would also strip away one of the most powerful tools for uncovering and remedying systemic bias in lending and take us back to the days when women could be denied credit because they are on maternity leave,” said Rice. “Disparate impact has been recognized and upheld for more than forty years as essential to enforcing equal lending opportunities and ensuring everyone has access to the credit they deserve. This reckless proposal would embolden discriminatory practices, undermine civil rights enforcement, and roll back generations of progress towards economic justice while threatening the health of the economy.”  

Click here to read the full comment.

For interviews, please e-mail NFHA Senior Advisor for Communications, Marketing, and Education Julian Glover at JGlover@NationalFairHousing.org 

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The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) is the country’s only national civil rights organization dedicated solely to eliminating all forms of housing and lending discrimination and ensuring equal opportunities for all people. As the trade association for over 170 fair housing and justice-centered organizations and individuals throughout the U.S. and its territories, NFHA works to dismantle longstanding barriers to equity and build diverse, inclusive, well-resourced communities.