This week marks the release of the Consumer Financial Protection Accountability and Reform Act of 2026, H.R. 10184. Discussions of measures to restructure the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are sharply polarized, mainly along political lines. On the Republican side, proponents of reform call out the bureau’s overreach. Defenders of the status quo, mostly on the Democratic side, remind us that the bureau was intended to protect consumers and insist that only the bureau can do so.

But many policymakers share the same concerns about the CFPB. And a close look at those concerns reveals a bipartisan case for reform. Many of the changes proposed by measures like the CFPB Reform Act of 2026 should be welcomed across party lines.

The standard argument for occupational licensing is that it keeps out low-quality providers. Existing evidence, however, does not support this claim; moreover, 

licensing erects barriers that can restrict labor supply and worker mobility, with potentially far-reaching implications for wages, employment opportunities, and economic efficiency.

Indeed, new research suggests that

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Last week, Williams—a natural gas company—hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a power plant called Socrates South that just began operating in New Albany, Ohio. Notably, this natural gas plant is fully disconnected from the public power grid, supplying the data centers of a Meta affiliate, Sidecat, without affecting anyone else’s electricity. 

Speed to Power

The New Albany site is part of a growing trend of data centers acquiring electric service more rapidly than traditional timelines of six, eight, or even ten years. The Socrates South plant came online in just 17 months, with the first filings made with the Ohio Power Siting Board in March of 2025. 

This is a big victory for the local community, the developer Williams, and their customer Sidecat, but also the Ohio lawmakers behind the legislation that made it possible: last year’s HB 15. That bill provided the regulatory certainty that a fully off-grid generation plant could avoid the long queue for grid connection and bring “speed to power” to customers who don’t want to wait. It’s aligned with a framework we’ve been advocating, called consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), which creates space for new, privately financed electric utilities to supply non-residential customers, such as data centers, without interconnecting with the existing grid.

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The draft of the CFPB Reform Act of 2026 includes provisions that clarify the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s duty to perform a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of proposed rules. Addressing the bureau’s carelessness in conducting CBAs should improve the quality and stability of its rules, so this change is overdue. 

The improvements will be greatest if the bureau does not enact rules that fail a CBA. However, subsections 103 (5)(A) (viii) and (ix) require the bureau to publish the justification for a rule enacted even when a CBA shows that another rule would be better or the rule’s costs exceed its benefits. This implies that the bureau may enact rules that fail a CBA, reducing the effectiveness of the reforms. 

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Much has changed for crypto in Washington since the current Trump administration took office. The enforcement campaign against the major exchanges has wound down; rulemaking has begun to replace litigation as the instrument of policy; and Congress has at last supplied rules for stablecoins. What has not changed is that market structure remains unfinished business, so most improvements rest on the goodwill of regulators rather than on the force of law. The Senate has never come closer to finishing the job than it has this year.

Market structure is the shorthand for a market’s basic legal architecture, meaning the rules that settle which body of law governs a given instrument and who supervises the firms that trade it. Supplying one for crypto is the bulk of what the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would do. The bill would fix what a digital asset is in the eyes of the law and whether it is subject to the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This matters because a security carries registration and disclosure duties that a commodity does not.

On August 4, Axios reported that the highly anticipated update of the White House framework for voluntary testing of frontier AI models will not be released to the public. In other words, and as others have put it, the White House is essentially putting the AI testing regime in a black box. This approach contravenes the rule of law, risks becoming as prescriptive as a licensing regime, and, most importantly, fails to fulfill its most basic objective: to build trust in the population.

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Automated pricing tools are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the modern economy as many businesses automate their pricing strategies to ensure their prices reflect market realities. Media attention, regulatory proposals, and a timely congressional hearing have largely focused on “surveillance pricing” and what we discussed as individualized dynamic pricing (IDP) in a previous blog. Despite fears of price gouging, these pricing methods have real efficiency benefits and are particularly effective at reducing waste.

However, there are other forms of automated tools in our day-to-day lives that do not necessarily rely on individuals’ data, as IDP does. This piece will focus on algorithmic pricing, understood as the general practice of automating the price-setting process, and the allegations that it might enable collusion amongst competitors. In the context of general algorithm-powered pricing, this alleged “collusion” typically refers to the use of automated tools to analyze market data to coordinate competitors’ prices. With a few notable exceptions, this is typical competitive behavior. For firms to compete on price, they must be able to track their competitors. Algorithmic pricing reduces the costs associated with monitoring and responding to market conditions. Taken alone, it is just using new technology to make an old process more efficient.

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