Hill Week Opens With ACU Push On CDFI Funding, 1071 Relief For Smaller Lenders / Fresh Today / CUToday.info

WASHINGTON–The House Appropriations Committee will start marking up its FY27 Financial Services and General Government bill Tuesday, and America’s Credit Unions is urging the committee to maintain or increase amounts for several credit union related funds.

The committee should fund the Treasury’s Community Financial Development Institutions (CDFI) Fund at $324 million, the same level as FY26. The subcommittee-passed bill contains $276.6 million for the CDFI Fund, ACU said.

America’s Credit Unions said it would also support provisions to require the prompt dispersal of funding and address delays in releasing the FY25 and FY26 funds.

The letter also encourages the committee to:

• Appropriate $4 million for NCUA’s Community Development Revolving Loan Fund, which provides grants to credit unions serving low-income communities. The subcommittee-passed bill funds it at $3.4 million
• Maintain the provision in the bill that would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency
• Reject any proposed reductions to the Small Business Administration’s lending and disaster relief programs, and any new proposed administrative fees for participating SBA lenders

CU Regulatory Relief

Separately, the House Financial Services Committee will mark up a credit union-backed regulatory relief bill starting Tuesday. The Small Lenders Exempt from New Data and Excessive Reporting (LENDER) Act (H.R. 941), introduced by committee Chairman French Hill (R-AK), would exempt certain smaller financial institutions from small business loan data collection requirements established under Section 1071 of Dodd-Frank.

“This legislation would provide regulatory relief to America’s small businesses, allowing credit unions and other community financial institutions to continue to provide access to credit to small businesses,” wrote America’s Credit Unions Senior Vice President of Advocacy Greg Mesack to the committee, adding that the five-year implementation period and new threshold of $10 billion in assets or 2,500 loans over a two-year period threshold “would help focus this requirement on large institutions and those that are active lenders in this space.”

The letter also notes America’s Credit Unions’ ongoing support for efforts to track and investigate financial crimes, but it does not support legislation to update the Corporate Transparency Act.