Plaintiffs-Appellants, Intervenors-Appellants, and Intervenor Plaintiffs-Appellants' Emergency Motion for a Stay Pending Appeal and an Expedited Appeal

INTRODUCTION

This Court has repeatedly emphasized that complying with an unlawful rule inflicts irreparable harm because those compliance costs cannot be recovered later. E.g., Wages & White Lion Invs., L.L.C. v. FDA,142 (5th Cir. 2021). Absent a stay pending appeal, Plaintiffs will suffer precisely that irreparable harm.

In 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) promulgated a rule that both exceeds its statutory authority and is arbitrary and capricious. That rule requires that lenders collect and submit to the CFPB numerous data points, including pricing information, about the loans they issue to small businesses. Plaintiffs’ members must comply with the CFPB’s rule as early as summer 2025. To meet the deadlines, lenders will have to incur substantial compliance costs in the imminent future, including technology costs and hiring new staff, and obtain sensitive demographic information that many lenders are only authorized to collect based upon the rule.

The district court has refused to vacate the CFPB’s unlawful rule. On October 15, 2024, Plaintiffs filed a stay motion, seeking to toll those deadlines, pending the outcome of this appeal. The district court failed to rule on it.

That means that, without this Court’s intervention, Plaintiffs, while challenging the CFPB rule in this Court, will be forced to comply with the rule and so doing will suffer irreparable harm. Given that irreparable harm, plus the likelihood that Plaintiffs will succeed on appeal and that the equities strongly favor staying the compliance deadlines while this Court resolves the merits of this appeal, a stay pending appeal is warranted.

Plaintiffs therefore ask that this Court grant a stay, tolling the compliance deadlines pending appeal.

In addition, given the imminent irreparable harms they face, Plaintiffs request that the Court grant a stay pending resolution of this stay motion.

Plaintiffs also request that the Court expedite this appeal.

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