As the Biden Administration came to a close, the CFPB released a compendium of guidance documents issued by the bureau between October 2021 and January 2025.
“CFPB guidance documents have provided clarification on the best interpretations of the federal consumer financial laws for those tasked with enforcing them, as well as the courts,” Brian Shearer, the bureau’s assistant director in the Office of Planning & Strategy and CFPB General Counsel Seth Frotman, wrote in an introduction to the volume.
The guidance documents include Consumer Financial Protection Circulars, Bulletins, Advisory Opinions, and Interpretive Rules. The officials pointed out that virtually all of the documents in the 363-page document were published in the Federal Register.
Because they are guidance documents, which do not go through the regulatory process, they do not carry the same force as rules. Critics have said that Chopra has relied on guidance documents too much.
The CFPB officials disagreed. “We believe that the interpretations set forth in these documents, which reflect the best reading of the federal consumer financial laws, will prove durable,” the bureau officials wrote.
Shearer and Frotman acknowledged the Supreme Court’s Loper decision, which overturned the Chevron deference doctrine. That doctrine directed courts to defer to a government agency’s interpretation of ambiguous statutory language as long as the interpretation was reasonable.
“In that spirit, our hope is that these CFPB guidance documents implementing the federal consumer financial laws prove useful to courts in their interpretation of those laws, as well as to the various enforcers of them,” Shearer and Frotman wrote. “Indeed, in many instances, courts have agreed with interpretations articulated in CFPB guidance documents.”
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