On November 25, the House Financial Services Committee majority staff published Operation Chokepoint 2.0: Biden’s Debanking of Digital Assets, a detailed account of how, in the Committee’s view, federal prudential regulators between 2021 and early 2025 discouraged banks from serving lawful digital asset businesses through informal guidance, supervisory posture, and enforcement.
As reported by Bloomberg, the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA) has hired Rohit Chopra, former Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau), to lead a new Consumer Protection and Affordability Working Group within DAGA’s policy arm. The move was announced as a coordinated, state-led response to rising living costs and widespread fraud, with a policy agenda that spans financial services, technology, and health care.
Private equity’s footprint in health care has expanded rapidly over the past decade, and in response states have begun to retool long‑standing doctrines and create new guardrails that target ownership, control, and transparency. The result is an emerging patchwork of laws and review processes that remake the corporate practice of medicine landscape, constrain common “friendly PC” structures, and require far more visibility into transactions involving private equity, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and management services organizations (MSOs).
To keep you informed of recent activities, below are several of the most significant federal and state events that have influenced the Consumer Financial Services industry over the past week.
On November 25, the New York Court of Appeals issued a pair of decisions — Art. 13 LLC and Van Dyke — that provide definitive guidance on the hotly contested and heavily litigated issue of the Foreclosure Abuse Prevention Act’s (FAPA) reach. In both cases, New York’s high court confirmed that FAPA applies retroactively to foreclosure actions where a final judgment of foreclosure and sale has not been enforced, and rejected all constitutional challenges to the statute.
On November 24, the plaintiffs in National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) filed a motion to clarify the existing injunction, asking the court to confirm that the CFPB may not justify noncompliance by declining to request funds from the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) and that “combined earnings” under 12 U.S.C. § 5497(a)(1) refers to the Federal Reserve System’s total earnings, not a net figure reduced by interest expense. In response, Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a minute order directing the parties to file submissions by November 26 identifying which provisions of the preliminary injunction they believe remain in force and addressing the court’s authority to enforce those provisions in light of the D.C. Circuit’s August 15 opinion and the pending petition for rehearing en banc.
To keep you informed of recent activities, below are several of the most significant federal and state events that have influenced the Consumer Financial Services industry over the past week.
On November 21, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) notified staff that it will restart supervision and require examiners, beginning with the 2026 examination cycle, to open each review by reading to the supervised entity a Humility in Supervisions Pledge. The pledge signals a notable shift in tone and execution that is in line with the CFPB’s Memorandum on Supervision and Enforcement Priorities from April 2025. Specifically, examinations will now have tighter alignment to the CFPB’s statutory authority, narrower and more clearly scoped exams (with a focus on “identified priority markets”), greater transparency and predictability, and an express preference to remediate issues in Supervision rather than escalate to Enforcement. It also formalizes a renewed focus on tangible consumer harm, especially to service members, their families, and veterans, and aims to minimize duplicative oversight where states or other regulators are already active.
As reported by Law360 on November 20, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) will hand off its remaining enforcement lawsuits and other active litigation to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) as the Bureau prepares for a potential funding lapse. CFPB staff were informed that DOJ will begin assuming matters from the CFPB’s enforcement and legal divisions in the coming weeks, with transfer logistics to be worked out. It remains unclear whether all pending cases will survive the transition or whether case schedules and continuity will be affected.
On November 20, the Illinois Supreme Court narrowly construed private rights of action under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), creating a de facto “concrete injury” requirement for claims under the FCRA and potentially other federal statutes with similar language authorizing rights of action. Although Article III’s concrete-injury requirement has become familiar in federal courts over the last decade, Illinois courts had not previously imposed such a requirement in cases involving statutory rights of action. The court in Fausett v. Walgreen Co., held that the FCRA does not explicitly authorize consumers to sue for violations, so the law did not authorize consumer lawsuits unless the consumer could show that a violation caused them a concrete injury. This ruling will significantly narrow consumers’ ability to bring no-injury claims under similar statutes in Illinois state courts.