Biden fails to launch a new public credit reporting agency

President Joe Biden did not deliver on a campaign promise to create a new agency within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to provide credit scores.

Currently, the three private agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — collect individuals' credit account information, including the size of loans outstanding, current credit card balances and problems with past payments, adverse judgments and bankruptcies. Financial institutions use this information to help decide the risks involved in offering people loans and lines of credit.

Critics, including Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., have accused the three private agencies of disadvantaging victims of identity theft, predatory lending, and reporting errors — problems they argue a public alternative could ease.

During Biden's presidency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent federal agency that applies and enforces federal consumer financial law, has taken oversight of the three private agencies. Along with the Federal Trade Commission, the bureau reached a settlement agreement with TransUnion over allegations of inaccuracies in its reports about tenants and published a report detailing consumer complaints about all three private agencies' practices.

However, the administration did not launch a new, public credit reporting agency, as Biden promised. 

"Nothing has changed" on creating a new public agency, said Thomas Kingsley, director of financial services policy at the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.

We rate this a Promise Broken.