What Always Happens

Congress Never Voted. The Bureau Asked the Court to Undo Its Own Rule.

A rule barring medical debt from credit reports never applied to a single report. Congress never voted. The Bureau asked the court to undo its own rule.

Our Revolution Media

11 Oct 2026 • 13 min read

A federal rule barring medical debt from consumer credit reports was published on 14 January 2025 and was due to take effect on 17 March. It never did. On 23 January the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a brief opposing the industry's request to block it. Thirteen days later, on 5 February, the same Bureau asked the court to block it instead, and the court did so the following day. Five months after that the Bureau told the judge its own rule exceeded its own authority, and he set it aside.

The coverage of this, where there was any, ran as a story about Congress. Two joint resolutions of disapproval were introduced in March 2025 and five of the largest actors in consumer credit reported lobbying on them for the next three quarters. That framing is where the record stops being about Congress: neither resolution ever received a vote, a hearing, or a second day of activity of any kind, the statutory tool that would have forced the question was never picked up, and by the time either could have mattered the rule was already enjoined.

THE GAP

The Rule, and the Week It Was Sued

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published the final rule on 14 January 2025 at 90 FR 3276, under docket CFPB-2024-0023, with an effective date of 17 March 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/14/2024-30824/prohibition-on-creditors-and-consumer-reporting-agencies-concerning-medical-information-regulation-v It had been proposed on 18 June 2024 at 89 FR 51682, with a comment period that closed on 12 August 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/06/18/2024-13208/prohibition-on-creditors-and-consumer-reporting-agencies-concerning-medical-information-regulation-v A correction followed on 27 January 2025 at 90 FR 8173. Those three documents are the entire Federal Register record for this rule. There is no delay notice, no withdrawal, and no stay.

The first lawsuit was filed on 7 January 2025, in the Eastern District of Texas. That is one week before the rule was published. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69525059/cornerstone-credit-union-league-v-consumer-financial-protection-bureau/ A second followed on 8 January 2025 in the Southern District of Texas. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69530184/aca-international-v-consumer-financial-protection-bureau/ Both were brought under the Administrative Procedure Act and docketed as review of agency action.

The plaintiffs in the first case are worth naming precisely, because the court's own opinion does. They are Cornerstone Credit Union League, described in the opinion as a regional trade association of credit unions, and the Consumer Data Industry Association, described as a national trade association of credit reporting agencies and background check companies. The second is the trade body of the industry the rule regulated.

The Consumer Data Industry Association had been reporting lobbying on this rule since the quarter it was proposed. Its second quarter 2024 filing names "the CFPB's proposed Prohibition on Creditors and Consumer Reporting Agencies Concerning Medical Information (Regulation V)". https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/78ff7fe7-254e-4190-ba52-9a58c07d0e14/print/ It filed the same line in the third and fourth quarters of 2024 and the first and second of 2025. Its third quarter 2024 filing, under a separate issue code, lists its subjects as "draft CFPB proposals, including issues related to a common portal, disputes, scoring, credit headers, medical debt, and litigation". https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/30035ddf-4fc9-4087-807b-847386f85fc3/print/ That filing was reported on 27 November 2024, six weeks before the association went to court. Across twenty five filings on record here it never once reports lobbying on either disapproval resolution.

Two things happened next, and the gap between them is the whole of this piece. On 23 January 2025 the Bureau, then under Director Rohit Chopra, filed a response in opposition to the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. On 5 February 2025 the Bureau filed an unopposed motion to stay, and on 6 February the court granted it.

The precision that claim requires: the Bureau is one legal party across both filings, and a court holds a party to its own positions whoever signs them. But the person did change. The opinion says the second filing came from "the Bureau, under new leadership", and by then the named defendant was Russell Vought rather than Chopra. How that leadership has run the Bureau since is the subject of They Could Not Close It. So They Are Staffing It. https://www.ourrevolution.media/they-could-not-close-it-so-they-are-staffing-it/ This is not one official reversing himself. It is one party reversing, thirteen days apart, across a change of who ran it, and the sentence worth keeping is the narrower one. The order records that what it granted was the defendants' own request, entered by agreement, for a preliminary injunction of ninety days: the operative words are "Defendants' request for the entry of an" injunction "is GRANTED". The rule's effective date was 17 March. It was enjoined five and a half weeks before it arrived, at the request of the agency that wrote it, and it never operated for a day.

Two Resolutions, Introduced and Abandoned

On 6 March 2025, eleven days before the rule was to take effect, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina introduced House Joint Resolution 74, disapproving the rule under chapter 8 of title 5. Thirteen members cosponsored it. Every one of the thirteen signed on the same day. It was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services at 14:07 UTC that afternoon. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-joint-resolution/74 The resolution has three recorded actions. All three are dated 6 March 2025. Two of them say "Introduced in House" and the third is the referral. There is nothing after. One qualification the actions list does not carry: congress.gov's own page for the resolution records a Financial Services committee meeting on 26 March 2025 at 10:00. The committee activity table for the resolution still shows a single entry, "Referred To" on 6 March, and no action taken. So the measure reached a committee agenda once and the committee recorded nothing about it.

On 11 March 2025, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced the companion, Senate Joint Resolution 36, with five cosponsors. It was read twice and referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/36 It has two recorded actions. Both are dated 11 March 2025.

Five entities reported lobbying on these resolutions, by number, in their own filings: Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, the American Bankers Association, and the US Chamber of Commerce. The filings are quarterly, so they establish the quarter in which the work was reported and not the day it happened. All five reported it for the first quarter of 2025. Four of the five reported it again in the second quarter, and again in the third.

Equifax's filing describes it as "H.J. Res 74 / S. J. Res 36 - A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection". https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/29bafbde-3758-49d2-9460-f507f889159f/print/ The American Bankers Association calls it "the resolution to disapproval of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus (CFPB) rule prohibiting medical debt information from being reported". https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/b147a9b7-8fc4-47e4-837f-6e262e7807b6/print/ TransUnion files the full statutory title. https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/8cd5f34e-73ca-4abd-82c4-aa124f538bf1/print/ Experian lists it among a run of credit reporting bills. https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/9aa85cea-c1da-4f50-a0ba-d869aa1a9384/print/ The US Chamber names the rule rather than the resolution. https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/f730c9d8-b3e4-452c-8d34-e92a92ef7134/print/

The Consent Judgment

While both resolutions sat, the Texas case moved. On 30 April 2025 the plaintiffs and the Bureau filed a Joint Motion to Approve Consent Judgment. The opinion records what they jointly asked for: they "agreed that the Medical Debt Rule exceeds the Bureau's authority" and requested "a final judgment holding unlawful and vacating the Medical Debt Rule".

Four parties had already moved to intervene, on 24 February 2025, anticipating, in the opinion's words, "that the Bureau would not defend the validity of the Rule". The opinion identifies them exactly: "two individuals who have medical debt, David Deeds and Harvey Coleman, and two clinics who devote resources to helping individuals with related issues, New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty and Tzedek DC". Disability Rights Texas and others filed as amici. The intervenors filed in opposition on 22 May 2025, argued at a two hour hearing on 11 June 2025, and filed a supplemental brief on 16 June 2025 on the court's own order.

On 11 July 2025 the court found the proposed consent judgment "fair, adequate, and reasonable" and granted the motion. The order says this:

"It is further ORDERED that the Medical Debt Rule, Prohibition on Creditors and Consumer Reporting Agencies Concerning Medical Information (Regulation V), 90 Fed. Reg. 3276 (Jan. 14, 2025), is hereby SET ASIDE and VACATED."

Final judgment was entered the same day. The docket has no entry after it. The second case was stayed on 14 May 2025 pending this ruling, stayed again on 21 July 2025, and voluntarily dismissed on 1 August 2025.

Three months later, on 28 October 2025, the Bureau issued an interpretive rule on the preemption of state Fair Credit Reporting Act laws, at 90 FR 48710, applicable the day it was published. An interpretive rule carries no comment period, and this one did not have one. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/10/28/2025-19671/fair-credit-reporting-act-preemption-of-state-laws

The Honest Version

Five entities reporting lobbying on a resolution does not establish that they caused anything, and this piece does not claim it. Lobbying disclosure records what was worked on, not what worked. The resolutions failed, and the outcome those five reported wanting arrived by a different route entirely, through a case two of them are not parties to.

The first thing a sceptical reader should reach for is that these companies lobby the Bureau constantly, so a filing naming a CFPB matter says nothing. On the record, that objection is half right. The American Bankers Association and Experian name the Bureau as a body they lobbied in all ten quarters on file here. For them this rule is one item inside a permanent relationship, and the piece should not and does not call the relationship notable. Equifax is the opposite case and the more interesting one: across ten quarters it never once reports lobbying the Bureau itself. It reports lobbying the House and the Senate, about a Bureau rule. That is what a disapproval strategy looks like in a disclosure form, and it is why the instrument matters more here than the volume.

The division of labour is the part the record does support. The trade body of the credit reporting industry sued, and never reported lobbying either resolution. Three credit bureaus, a banking association and the Chamber reported lobbying the resolutions, and none of them is a plaintiff. Read together those are two routes run in parallel by the same industry, and the one that worked was the one nobody had to vote on.

What cannot be established from these records: who asked the Bureau to change position between 23 January and 5 February 2025, when that decision was made, and whether anyone outside the litigation was consulted. The docket shows the filings and their dates, not the deliberation behind them.

ROOT

The Statute Was Never Touched

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is intact. Every word of it survived 11 July 2025. What ended was the rule that told creditors and consumer reporting agencies what the Act required of them about medical information, which means the protection stopped operating while the law it rested on stayed on the books and quotable by anyone who wants to say nothing was taken away.

That shape has a name in this archive, and its clearest instance is Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), decided 25 June 2013. The Court struck down the coverage formula in section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act. It did not touch section 5. Preclearance became inoperative without being repealed, and restoring it would have required Congress to pass a new formula. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/529/ The library records that citation as verified against a secondary host rather than the Court's own site, which is worth stating rather than hiding.

The parallel is structural and it is limited, and the limit is worth naming. In Shelby County the government defended its statute and lost. Here the government asked to lose. That is not a weaker version of the same mechanism, it is a faster one: a rule can be undone by the agency that wrote it in six months, where a statute took a decade of litigation.

THE COUNTER MECHANISM

The Congressional Review Act did not fail here because it lacks teeth. It has a specific tooth, and nobody used it.

Under 5 U.S.C. 802(c), if the Senate committee a disapproval resolution is referred to has not reported it at the end of twenty calendar days after the submission or publication date, "such committee may be discharged from further consideration of such joint resolution upon a petition supported in writing by 30 Members of the Senate, and such joint resolution shall be placed on the calendar." https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2024-title5/USCODE-2024-title5-partI-chap8-sec802 Once discharged, subsection (d)(1) makes the motion to proceed privileged and waives all points of order against it. No sixty vote threshold applies. Thirty signatures move it to the floor and a simple majority passes it.

Senate Joint Resolution 36 was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on 11 March 2025. Its chairman is Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. The ranking member is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. https://banking.senate.gov/ The committee has taken no recorded action on the resolution. Its entire action history is the two entries from the day it was introduced. Twenty calendar days after 14 January 2025 is 3 February 2025, so the discharge petition was available to any thirty senators from five weeks before this resolution was even introduced until well past the day the rule was vacated. No petition was filed.

No decision point on this resolution remains, and the piece will not manufacture one. The sixty day disapproval window under 802(a) ran from whichever came later, the Bureau's submission of the rule to Congress or its publication in the Federal Register, and both of those dates are in January 2025. The later of those two is publication: GAO records the rule as received on 13 January 2025 and the Federal Register published it on 14 January, so 14 January governs. https://www.gao.gov/fedrules/210805 The window is closed. The rule it targeted is vacated. The judgment was not appealed. What would create a new window is a new rule: a fresh submission under 801(a)(1)(A) starts a fresh sixty days, and the interpretive rule of 28 October 2025 is the kind of document that question attaches to. Establishing whether it was submitted to Congress at all would take the GAO submission record, which this piece did not open.

There is a dated appearance, and it is worth naming because it is six days from publication rather than hypothetical. The House Committee on Financial Services has a hearing scheduled for 15 September 2026, the annual testimony of the Secretary of the Treasury on the state of the international financial system. Chairman Hill presides. Medical debt is not on that agenda and this piece is not going to pretend it is. What the date supplies is a room, on the record, with the member who has held this resolution since March 2025 sitting in the chair.

At the Reader's Scale

The rule is gone and the comment period that produced it closed in 2024, so the familiar route is unavailable. A different one is not, and it is statutory rather than a matter of anyone's goodwill.

5 U.S.C. 553(e) reads, in full: "Each agency shall give an interested person the right to petition for the issuance, amendment, or repeal of a rule." https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2024-title5/USCODE-2024-title5-partI-chap5-subchapII-sec553 That is one sentence and it has no deadline, no threshold, and no standing requirement beyond interest. It applies to the interpretive rule of 28 October 2025 the same as to any other rule, and a petition for repeal of that rule is a thing a group of people can draft and file together.

The docket where this rule was made is still open to the public and still accepts filings. https://www.regulations.gov/docket/CFPB-2024-0023 A petition is not a comment on a pending proposal, which is why the closed comment period does not bar it, and it is not a lawsuit, which is why it needs no lawyer. What it produces is a dated agency record of having been asked, which is the thing this whole sequence turned out to be short of.

Two honest limits. An agency may deny a petition, and denials of petitions for rulemaking are reviewed by courts at the far end of deference. And a petition filed by one person is a letter. The instrument is written for an interested person and works at the scale of an organisation with a named campaign, which is what the four intervenors in the Texas case already are. They argued this and lost on 11 July 2025, and their filings are on the public docket.

The rule barring medical debt from credit reports never applied to a single credit report. The two resolutions written to kill it are still, technically, alive in committee. Neither fact is the one that decided anything.