Biden reverses Trump changes to bank antidiscrimination law

The Biden administration is repealing changes made by the Trump administration to an important law aimed at stopping banks from discriminating against racial minorities and the poor

NEW YORK -- The Biden administration said Tuesday it will repeal changes made by the Trump administration to a law aimed at stopping banks from discriminating against racial minorities and the poor. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the nation's bank regulators, said it plans to reconsider the regulations written in 2020 governing a law known as the Community Reinvestment Act. The civil rights era law requires banks to document the extent of their lending to the communities that surround their branches in order to ensure they are not just lending to the wealthy or to white customers. The OCC said it plans to start from scratch, and told banks to effectively ignore the 2020 changes while the agency rewrites the regulations. Trump's Comptroller of the Currency, Joseph Otting, had made revising the Community Reinvestment Act a cornerstone of his tenure. The law is widely respected by the industry and activists alike, but both sides have agreed for years that it was out of date. Many banks now operate entirely online, ATMs are ubiquitous, and it is increasingly more difficult to define what a “community” is in order to comply with the law.