Bearing the Burden

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in Room 2360, Rayburn House Office Building. Hon. Tim Huelskamp chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding. Present: Representatives Huelskamp, Luetkemeyer, Kelly, and Chu. Chairman HUELSKAMP. I call this hearing to order. It has been just about 6 years since the passage of the Dodd- Frank Wall Street Reform, and in that time we have seen a steady stream of new rules and regulations imposed upon financial institutions. These hundreds of rules and thousands of pages of regulation have been touted as necessary to secure financial stability, and targeting just those large institutions which were blamed for the financial collapse. But as this Committee has learned, our small community banks have not been spared from the regulatory burden. Across the country, community banks are seeing the costs of complying with regulations soar, and the result has been less capital available for the main street shop looking to expand, for the entrepreneur looking to start a business, and for our neighbors hoping to purchase a new home. The impact of regulation on community banks is felt especially hard in our country's rural areas, like my district in Kansas. The rising cost of regulation is causing many small banks to be forced to merge with larger entities that may not understand the local community, or causing them to shut their doors entirely. In rural towns without many other alternatives for access to capital, the results of these top-down regulations can be devastating and impact the whole town and the entire county and region. Home mortgage lending, small business lending, agricultural lending, all areas where community banks play a leading role in providing capital, become much more difficult and much more costly to consumers.