Back in March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) made a little-noticed move to implement Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rule change altered the language of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) which assures equal access to lines of credit, particularly for small businesses. This probably sounds like some typical government housecleaning that lies far down in the weeds, but the change includes some woke language that will have real-world implications for small business owners and employers. Under this rule, banks will be forced to report demographic details of the business owner who is applying for credit, and that information may wind up being available to the public. Senator John Kennedy  (R-Louisiana) and Republican Congressman Roger Williams of Texas have introduced bills to roll back these changes. (From Senator Kennedy’s website)

“By collecting and publishing personal demographic and other information, the CFPB is putting small business owners at risk of having their private financial affairs exposed to a watching world. Reporting these personal details is an invasion of privacy and a waste of resources aimed at furthering the woke agenda. The practical impact of this rule could hamstring lending to Main Street,” Kennedy said.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) new rule is a continued attack on Main Street America. Each day, small businesses struggle with rising costs, increasing interest rates, and ongoing labor shortages, and this new rule only builds on those issues. We cannot allow the CFPB to continue to add burdensome requirements without any consideration of their impact on small businesses and lenders. I am proud to stand by my commitment to protect Main Street America from costly over-regulation by unelected bureaucrats,” said Williams.

Under these changes to Section 1071, banks will be forced to determine the race, ethnicity, and sex of the business owner who is seeking a line of credit. They would also have to indicate to the government whether the business is minority-owned, women-owned, or LGBT-owned. The CFPB would then be able to publish some or all of that information on a publicly available website, potentially allowing the public to identify the identity of the business and the owner.

The implications of this should be obvious. For one thing, woke actors will clearly be able to leverage this process to promote credit lines to businesses operated by politically favored classes while disfavoring the white patriarchy or whatever. Also, it will be even easier for leftist activists to promote boycotts of businesses that are deemed to be insufficiently woke.

One of many unanswered questions surrounding this mess is what in the world any of this information has to do with a company’s financial solvency or creditworthiness. No company suddenly becomes more worthy of credit based on the skin tone of the owner(s) or the gender of the people they might be attracted to. And if fiscal viability isn’t the issue, then why is the CFPB involved in this process at all?

Raising even more concerns is the fact that the CFPB doesn’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to protecting public data. Just this year, the agency suffered a data breach that wound up revealing the personal data of up to 256,000 consumers. And despite being required by law, they did not notify the exposed consumers for two months.

Is this really the agency that we want to have the private data of small business owners in its grubby little hands? Given the ongoing campaign of wokeness in the Executive Branch these days, it’s far too easy to foresee the wheels coming off of this wagon quickly. If these bills manage to pass and Joe Biden issues a veto, you’ll know all you need to know about the current administration’s plans.