REVIEW Act Mandates 5-Year Regulatory Checkup for Financial Agencies, Focuses on Quantifying Costs

The new Regulatory Efficiency, Verification, Itemization, and Enhanced Workflow Act of 2025—or the REVIEW Act—is looking to shake up how federal financial regulators check their own work. Essentially, this bill updates an existing law (the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996) by demanding more frequent and detailed self-audits from the agencies that oversee banks and other financial institutions.

The Clock Speeds Up: From 10 Years to 5

Currently, agencies like the Federal Reserve or the FDIC have to review all their regulations once every ten years. The REVIEW Act cuts that timeline in half, mandating a full review every five years. For the average person, this means the rules governing your mortgage, your bank account safety, and even the availability of credit are supposed to be looked at and potentially updated twice as often. The bill also streamlines the terminology, replacing the older term “appropriate Federal banking agency” with the broader “Federal financial institutions regulatory agency,” which basically just clarifies who’s on the hook for these new requirements.

New Mandate: The Cumulative Cost Check

The biggest change here is a brand-new requirement for agencies to conduct an internal review of the cumulative impact of their regulations. This isn't just about reviewing one rule at a time; it’s about looking at how all the rules stack up together. This new review has four main focus areas that directly impact your wallet and the economy:

1. Consumer Access: How do the rules affect your ability to get financial products and services, like loans or checking accounts?
2. Market Availability: How do the rules affect the availability of products for financial and nonfinancial firms?
3. Credit and Liquidity: What is the impact on the availability of credit and how easily money flows (liquidity) in U.S. markets?
4. Cost-Benefit Balance: Assessing the trade-off between the safety of the financial system and the overall cost to the U.S. economy.

Crucially, the bill requires these agencies to quantify, to the extent possible, the direct and indirect economic costs imposed by the regulations. Imagine trying to put a dollar figure on the total administrative burden of every single rule—that’s the task.

Streamlining or Stripping Away?

This new internal review must also include recommendations to streamline, simplify, or eliminate regulations that are deemed “duplicative, outdated, or unnecessarily burdensome.” This is where the rubber meets the road. On one hand, getting rid of outdated rules that slow down business or make compliance needlessly complex is a win for everyone. On the other hand, the focus on quantifying costs and identifying “unnecessarily burdensome” rules could be used to target important consumer protections if agencies decide those protections are too expensive to enforce or comply with. For instance, a rule requiring banks to provide clear, standardized loan disclosures might be seen as “burdensome” by the bank, even if it’s vital for a first-time homebuyer.

Finally, the agencies must now report their findings from these internal reviews to Congress, along with a concrete plan detailing how they intend to reduce the regulatory burdens they’ve identified. This increases accountability, but it also means Congress will be receiving a steady stream of reports focused intensely on the costs of regulation, which could amplify pressure to deregulate.