ICBA's Impact on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

Since the presidential election in 2024, with Republicans holding majorities in the House and Senate, ICBA has seized the opportunity to work with a unified Congress to advance legislation that could help community banks in meaningful ways. 

Rep. French Hill (R-Arkansas) ran for chairman of the House Financial Services Committee on a “make community banking great again” agenda, eventually winning the chairmanship and opening 2025 with a hearing on that same theme. ICBA president and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey testified at the hearing, laying out a community banking agenda for the year, including regulatory relief, threshold adjustments and more tailored policy for community banks.

Throughout 2025, the committee has been working to “make community banking great again” by advancing more than two dozen pro-community bank bills through monthly markups. ICBA has been working to ensure the strongest bills get through the House and Senate with enough bipartisan support to become law.

Prioritizing community banks

Rep. Hill and the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), agreed on a package of community bank bills that House Democrats could support as part of a larger effort. The Senate was trying to advance a major housing bill through the National Defense Authorization Act, but that effort stalled in late 2025.

Earlier this year, the House recognized that community banks needed a place in the broader housing conversation. Community banks play a significant role in mortgage lending and affordable housing, especially in rural areas, so the Hill-Waters package was attached to the housing bill that became the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

The House passed the bill with strong bipartisan support, but the Senate then stripped out the community banking title and sent the bill back to the House without those provisions. ICBA pushed back hard, making the case that the community banking measures belonged in the package.

What started as a partisan discussion became more of a House-versus-Senate fight over whether those provisions would survive. After weeks of advocacy and grassroots outreach from ICBA members, the Senate agreed to include nine community banking provisions, seven of which were ICBA-specific priorities. This package marked a significant advocacy win for ICBA, especially because the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), had not previously supported bank deregulatory measures during her Senate career.

7 ICBA priorities that made the cut

The final package gives community banks targeted wins in areas that affect their day-to-day operations, long-term growth and ability to serve local customers. Here’s what made it into the final community banking title:

• Community bank deposit access: When custodial deposits stay below 20% of an institution’s total liabilities and the institution has less than $10 billion in assets, those deposits will no longer count as brokered deposits. This gives community banks that are dealing with deposit insurance and brokered deposit concerns some breathing room.
• Keeping deposits local: This provision updates how reciprocal deposits are treated under brokered deposit rules, using a graduated scale based on the institution’s total liabilities. To qualify, the institution must be well-capitalized and have strong supervisory ratings.
• Tailored regulatory updates for supervisory testing: Community banks between $3 billion and $6 billion in assets will qualify for an 18-month examination cycle. Regulators will examine banks in that range less frequently, giving them a more tailored supervisory schedule.
• Advancing the mentor-protégé program for small financial institutions: The Treasury Department will create a mentor-protégé program that pairs large financial institutions with smaller depository institutions. The goal is to help smaller institutions build capacity, serve customers and potentially act as financial agents.
• American access to banking: Federal banking regulators will have to streamline the de novo application process, reduce duplicative information requests and review capital-raising restrictions, including those affecting nonaccredited investors.
• Promoting new bank formation: Creates a two-year phase-in pilot for de novo financial institutions to meet federal capital requirements. That addresses one of the major barriers to new community bank formation since Dodd-Frank.
• Rural depositories revitalization study: Federal prudential regulators will have to study ways to improve growth, capital adequacy and profitability for rural depository institutions. They’ll also have to identify regulatory barriers affecting rural banks and new bank formation, with a report due to Congress within one year of enactment.

Combined, these provisions give community banks targeted relief in areas that affect deposits, exams, mortgage lending, rural banking and new bank formation. They also recognize a larger issue: The industry needs more community banks entering the market, not just fewer barriers for those already serving local communities.

Next up: the Main Street Capital Access Act

Turning the page from the housing bill, ICBA is now focused on the next set of community bank priorities. Several additional bills have already been passed out of the House Financial Services Committee and bundled into the Main Street Capital Access Act, which the House passed in July.

The Main Street Capital Access Act includes additional provisions to tailor regulations to the lower risk profile of community banks, ease excessive capital requirements, ensure fair reviews of agency examinations, offer relief at the holding company level, and more. 

Following a bipartisan vote in the House, ICBA is encouraging the Senate to take up and pass this measure to amplify community bank lending in local communities nationwide.

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