White House pushed to scrap race, sex requirements for mortgage applications
WASHINGTON — A legal group aligned with President Trump is pressing the White House to eliminate a requirement that home lenders collect information on the race and sex of mortgage applicants.
America First Legal (AFL), founded by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, criticized the rule as a racial “surveillance tool” and is calling on the Trump administration to restore what it calls “colorblind” lending policies.
Under the current rule, enforced by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), lenders must record applicants’ race, sex, and ethnicity—even if applicants decline to provide the information themselves, based on the lender’s observations. AFL attorney Alice Kass said the policy “turns mortgage applications into a government-mandated demographic sorting exercise.”
“These policies exceed the CFPB’s authority and compel the collection of protected personal information without legal justification,” Kass said.
President Trump’s administration has previously sought to reduce the CFPB’s power, but federal courts have blocked those efforts. On Jan. 12, AFL petitioned the CFPB to eliminate the rule entirely. On Wednesday, the group formally asked the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to withdraw its approval, citing the rule’s origins in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The White House can influence federal disclosure requirements under the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, which allows administrations to remove regulations deemed overly burdensome.
AFL said OIRA has the authority to either narrow the rule or eliminate it completely, and cited recent Supreme Court decisions, including Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, to support its call to end race and sex data collection.
Trump last year signed an executive order directing his administration to adopt colorblind regulatory policies.
“Government bureaucrats use [the rule] to justify policing mortgage lenders for failing to balance their books based on race and sex,” AFL wrote in its petition. “It is essentially a surveillance tool that pressures lenders to compromise between doing business with reliable borrowers and meeting government-mandated race and sex quotas. This burden stifles free enterprise and prioritizes social engineering over merit-based lending.”
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