House passes Main Street Act, easing bank regulations, in 270–155 vote
The House of Representatives passed H.R. 6955, the Main Street Capital Access Act, on July 21, 2026, by a vote of 270 to 155, with one member voting present. The measure now goes to the Senate, where it was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
The bill, sponsored by Representative J. French Hill of Arkansas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is a broad package that lessens and modifies banking regulations. It gives new banks a three-year phase-in period to meet certain capital requirements, reduces the leverage ratio for certain rural community banks, and directs financial regulators to tailor their rules to institutions' risk profiles and business models. It also eases requirements for bank mergers — in some cases allowing regulators to approve mergers of banks under $10 billion in assets without weighing whether the deal is anticompetitive — and raises the dollar asset thresholds that determine which banks are exempt from various reporting and regulatory requirements.
Supporters described the bill as relief for smaller institutions burdened by rules written for the largest banks. Hill, a former community bank founder, said he rose "in strong support" of the measure, arguing that the 2008-era Dodd-Frank Act had subjected community and midsize banks to "the same rules and the same level of scrutiny of the largest, most systemically important institutions" and had "stifled local lending" and "accelerated industry consolidation." Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky, who chairs the Financial Institutions Subcommittee, said the bill would help "community banks, Main Street banks, midsize banks" and that "regulation should follow the risk, not the ZIP Code." Hill also said that two-thirds of the bills in the package had support from Democratic members and that nothing in the bill weakens consumer compliance, fair lending, or fair housing laws.
Opponents said the bill went far beyond aid to community banks. Representative Maxine Waters of California, the committee's ranking member, called it "Wall Street deregulation … hiding as a community bank bill" and said it would be "the most sweeping deregulation of Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis." She argued the package would loosen safeguards on large regional banks like those that failed in 2023 and would hamper the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's ability to issue new rules. Representative Nydia Velázquez of New York said the bill "represents the largest amount of bank deregulation since before the financial crisis" and would "push risk into the shadows and make the next publicly financed bailout more likely." A letter from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, signed by more than 700 community organizations and read into the record, urged a "no" vote, warning the bill would weaken fair-lending transparency, community accountability, and merger review.
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