Trump’s CFPB Can Finish the Job: Replace Biden’s Overreach with Free Market Reform

With speculation building over the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a draft rule updating Section 1033’s “open banking” requirements expected within weeks, the agency has an opportunity to finally restore common sense. President Trump’s CFPB can finish the job by replacing Biden-era overreach with free market reform that actually protects consumers instead of empowering data middlemen.

Under President Biden, the CFPB issued the Section 1033 “open banking” Rule, a European-style, price-cap mandate that forced banks to hand over unfettered access to Americans’ financial data to fintech firms.

The result was predictable. Data aggregators and Silicon Valley billionaires cheered the rule because it made them richer, giving them broad cover to run wild with private financial data while blaming financial institutions for any fallout.

Conservatives were skeptical from the start. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration determined the rule was unlawful. And now, a federal judge with nearly 30 years on the bench has agreed, ruling that Biden’s CFPB failed to consider the full scale of harm its data-sharing mandate posed to consumers, especially on data security. The court paused implementation so the Trump CFPB can chart a better path forward.

In a scramble to save the 1033 mandate, fintech companies have been pushing false narratives about bank charging structures, claiming consumers would lose access to their platforms because banks wanted to put them out of business by charging them for access to secure infrastructure.

But recent reporting from CNBC showed those allegations to be wrong. Almost all major data fintechs have now reached agreements with banks, establishing guardrails around middleman access to financial data while still allowing the aggregators to serve customers.

The free market is already solving the very issues Biden’s rule pretended to fix. Yet Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to demand heavy government mandates and price controls, as laid out in her recent letter to the CFPB. Her push to resurrect the Biden “open banking” rule aligns perfectly with what the fintech lobby has been urging for years, even as real-world deals between banks and data firms prove those mandates unnecessary.

A recent op-ed from RealClearMarket’s Jon Decker captured the absurdity well, calling the Biden-era rule “a solution in search of a problem” and highlighting Plaid’s agreement with JPMorgan, which would “not impact Plaid’s current customer agreements and pricing models” at all. The fintech data middlemen never needed Biden’s regulatory shield. Once the government stepped back, businesses reached workable solutions on their own.

Now the CFPB must move decisively toward President Trump’s free market, consumer-first agenda. The upcoming draft rule updating Section 1033 is the moment to clean out failed Biden-era policies, strengthen data protection through innovation rather than coercion, and secure President Trump’s legacy of free market prosperity going forward.