WASHINGTON—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told community bankers Thursday that the Trump Administration is working to reverse more than a decade of regulatory drift that, in his words, left smaller institutions “too small to succeed.”
Scott Bessent
Speaking before the Federal Reserve’s Community Bank Conference, Bessent outlined an aggressive deregulatory agenda aimed at restoring parity between Wall Street and Main Street lenders.
Bessent said the administration’s top goal is to “empower community banks to take back control of their future,” noting that smaller banks’ share of U.S. assets, loans, and commercial real estate lending has sharply declined since 2010. He said the administration is determined to reverse what he called “a trail of destruction” caused by post-crisis rules that favored large banks and constrained small-town credit access.
Bessent detailed a series of early actions: rescinding the prior administration’s Community Reinvestment Act overhaul, ending the use of “reputation risk” in supervision, revising brokered-deposit limits, and retracting merger and incentive-compensation guidance. He said the OCC has already reduced assessments on smaller banks by 30% and moved back to risk-based exam schedules, while the FDIC has recommitted to tailored oversight and new appeals mechanisms.
The CFPB, he added, has withdrawn more than 60 interpretive rules and is revisiting both Section 1071 small-business reporting and the open-banking rule. Congress, meanwhile, has nullified the Bureau’s overdraft rule and prohibited “trigger leads” in mortgage marketing.
Looking ahead, Bessent highlighted plans to reform anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing supervision, starting with new FinCEN FAQs released Thursday to clarify structuring SARs and CTR filing triggers. A forthcoming rule will refocus AML oversight on program effectiveness rather than process compliance, he said. Treasury also supports expanding FDIC insurance on non-interest-bearing transaction accounts and maintaining GSE policies that preserve secondary-market access for small lenders.
Bessent urged community bankers to “go on offense,” using regulatory relief to regain market share and invest in technology.
“The ball is in your hands again,” he said, emphasizing that a strong community-bank sector is central to the administration’s broader vision of “Parallel Prosperity,” where Main Street and Wall Street grow together.