Valued at Zero

For me, one of the most chilling scenes in Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel filled with many chilling scenes, is when the backstory is finally revealed, and the protagonist discovers her “Compucard” no longer works. In the course of three or four pages, women’s existence as independent financial entities has been wiped out, and they’re entirely dependent on men for money.

“Hush,” her husband says, when she talks to him about losing access to all of her money and being fired from her job. “You know I’ll always take care of you.”

Today is my late mother’s birthday, so naturally she’s been on my mind. Mom was a ferocious hard worker, whose first job was in a bakery when she was just 13 years old. Ultimately, however, she became a traditional homemaker who dropped out of college at 21 to marry my father, began having children right away, and was never paid for her labor again. Unlike me, she didn’t call herself a feminist. And yet, each year when the Social Security Administration mailed out its annual statements of how much she’d earned to qualify for benefits (something I guess they no longer do), Mom would sit me down, show me the long list of zeros under the “earnings” heading on her statement, and demand that I never stop working. Not because my father didn’t “take care of” her; he did. Because she never wanted me to be valued at zero like she was. Mom never forgot that prior to passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, she couldn’t even get a credit card with her name on it. As she reminded me numerous times over the years, before the law changed, she’d go to Sears to select appliances for our new house or buy “Toughskins” jeans for my brothers at the start of the school year—financial decisions my father had nothing to do with—and have to sign as “Mrs. Anthony Minnefor” using a card imprinted with my father’s name. As if she didn’t matter. As if she didn’t exist.

In a story that didn’t get nearly enough coverage amid the onslaught of other terrible news at the end of the year and in the weeks since, the Trump Administration is currently taking concrete steps to scale back the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. As originally enacted, the ECOA prohibited financial institutions from discriminating against any applicant for credit based on sex or marital status. Two years later, the law was amended to also prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, or age. Now, under the guise of facilitating compliance with the ECOA , the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed amended regulations “clarifying the obligations imposed by the statute.”

Like a lot of the double speak coming out of the Trump Administration, the Bureau’s stated purpose for the amended regulations is false. The new regulations are not intended to facilitate compliance with the ECOA, they’re designed to weaken it, in part by eliminating the “disparate impact” approach to establishing unlawful discrimination under the statute. That attack is part of a larger effort by the Administration, outlined in an Executive Order signed in April 2025, to make it more difficult to prove discrimination in any type of case—and, by extension, make it easier for institutions to get away with discriminatory conduct.

Under the prior rules, applicants for credit could establish an ECOA claim by relying on the disparate impact theory of liability and proving that a particular policy or requirement had a discriminatory impact on a protected class of applicants like unmarried women, African Americans, or people over the age of 40, even if there was no specific intent to discriminate. Without the disparate impact theory, ECOA claimants have to show that a financial institution intentionally discriminated against them. That means that, under the proposed regulations, if a store denied a woman in my mother’s position a credit card in her own name, she would have to show the denial was the result of intentional discrimination against her personally even if the store’s policy had the effect of preventing a majority of women from obtaining a card.

The proposed regulations also interpret the ECOA’s prohibition against “discouragement” of applicants or prospective applicants for credit much more narrowly, so that it would no longer apply to statements that “express, imply, or suggest” a discriminatory preference or policy and would only apply to statements that “express” such a preference or policy. Meaning that as long as a store or financial institution could manage not to state explicitly that they don’t extend credit to women or other “protected” applicants, they can’t be found to have discouraged them. So much for the ECOA’s stated goal of achieving fairness and impartiality in the extension of credit.

On December 12, 2025, days before the comment period for the proposed regulations closed, the Attorneys General of twenty states and the District of Columbia submitted a long letter outlining a multitude of reasons why the changes sought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would “lead to more discrimination” and “undermin[e] Congress’s purpose” in enacting the ECOA. But given the Trump Administration’s extensive efforts to undermine the Bureau, which only remains in existence because in April 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional attack on the method by which it’s funded, it is unimaginable that the arguments in the letter will have any effect at all. After all, one of the Bureau’s biggest critics, Russell Vought, now serves as its Acting Director.

No doubt someone reading this will say I’m overreacting to these regulatory proposals; that no one’s turning off women’s credit cards like they did in The Handmaid’s Tale. True, they haven’t turned them off yet. But they are installing a legal switch that could make it easier for them to do so in the future. And they don’t need to cut us all off at the same time. As we’ve seen in so many other contexts, the far right is quite happy to chip away at rights gradually (for example, with waiting periods for abortions and identification requirements for non-citizens) until those rights have essentially been eliminated (by total bans and identification requirements for citizens as well). They know we’re distracted by more obvious and immediate horrors, like the federal government’s armed invasion of certain American cities in the name of immigration enforcement and the Administration’s shocking threats against our allies abroad. In the meantime, financial independence for women and other protected groups—which, as Margaret Atwood knew, is a core component to any independence at all—is slipping away, as our so-called leaders take us back to the “good old days” when my poor mother was told her work was worth nothing, and she couldn’t even sign her own name to a credit slip.