Freedom Partners, the free-market political nonprofit group associated with the Koch Brothers, will push Congress to undo as many of President Obama’s regulations as possible, aiming to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s payday lending and arbitration rules in the first 100 days of President-elect Trump’s administration.
The group, which sat out the presidential election, advocates lighter federal regulation and will push the new government to cut back Obama’s efforts to impose new rules on a range of industries and activities, including emissions, coal mining, healthcare exchanges, calorie labeling and much more.
Republicans won control of both chambers of Congress promising to curb regulation, and lawmakers already passed legislation this week that would slow the issuance of major rules in the future.
Yet the actual work of stopping Obama’s rules, Freedom Partners warned, is more complex than many members of Congress and their voters may think. Many of them believed that, if Trump won, he would be able to simply tear Obama’s regulations apart, and “it’s just not as simple as that,” said Andy Koenig, the group’s vice president of policy.
Only executive actions and rules that are still in the proposal stage can be immediately canceled, the group warned.
Those include the payday lending rules proposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in June, meant to prevent borrowers from falling into debt “traps” of successive high-cost loans. The industry has warned that the rules would effectively wipe them out, while Republicans have argued that they would take away a useful option from people in desperate need of credit.
The Trump administration could summarily ax the bureau’s May proposal to ban financial companies from offering contracts that prevent customers from filing class-action lawsuits.
Both rules were favored by liberal groups and backed by Hillary Clinton in her failed campaign versus Trump.
It would not be as straightforward to stop Obama rules that have already gone into effect. Stopping those would require Congress to act, necessitating rounding up votes and taking floor time.
Koenig said his group aims to influence Congress to hold votes on major rules such as the Department of Labor’s conflict-of-interest rule, meant to crack down on financial advisers receiving kickbacks for recommending certain financial products.
Pressing the legislature, and especially the Senate, which is slowed by filibuster rules, to take up bills to slash regulations quickly would mean competing against any number of priorities. But Koenig argued that it would be attractive to Republican leaders looking to force Democrats to face difficult votes related to Obama’s rules.
“I think we can put a lot of folks in a bad position defending an indefensible economic record,” said Koenig, referring specifically to Senate Democrats in states carried by Trump.
