The Government Accountability Office says the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC have been reviewing their own banking regulations for decades without ever writing down how they decide a rule is outdated. That’s the core finding in GAO-26-108027, released this summer, which examined how the three agencies carry out their duty under the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996 to review every regulation at least once a decade.
GAO isn’t asking the agencies to kill any specific rule. It’s asking them to document the process: prioritize which regulations get scrutinized, run cost-benefit analyses, track how public comments actually change outcomes, and weigh the cumulative burden of overlapping requirements instead of grading each rule in isolation. None of that exists on paper today.
The agencies haven’t embraced or rejected the recommendations. They’ve simply described the steps already built into the current EGRPRA review, which groups regulations into 12 categories and is still collecting public comment.
The timing matters more than the substance. GAO has no enforcement power, only the ability to recommend, but its findings give the Trump Administration’s deregulatory executive orders an independent, apolitical citation. Once an agency writes down a cost-benefit methodology, banks and trade groups finally get something concrete to challenge in comment letters, rather than lobbying against unstated agency discretion.
Once the three agencies reach consensus, the joint report goes to the FFIEC for a vote, then to Congress and the Federal Register. No deadline attached, but the process is already running.
James Okafor