Mark Pinsky Explains Why Supporting the CDFI Agenda in 2026 Requires A Different Approach
A letter from CDFI Friendly America’s Founder, Mark Pinsky.
The Trump Administration’s plans to eliminate the CDFI Fund’s core financial assistance programs call for an equally forceful advocacy response. With bipartisan support in Congress and an enviable track record, the CDFI Fund will push back and, I believe, succeed in restoring the cuts.
This year—fighting for CDFI Fund appropriations for fiscal 2026—we need to do more and do some things differently. The Trump Administration is not simply saying that CDFIs are not a priority; it is saying that CDFIs no longer merit government support because they have matured.
Some CDFIs have matured, but CDFI opportunity markets (aka CDFI “deserts”) have not. They require subsidy, and so it is that even mature CDFIs are profitable but not profit-maximizing.
The CDFI industry has overcome broadside attacks in the past—in 1994, 1995, 2001-2008, and 2017-2020. In fact, we met the challenges and continued to grow.
In 1991, I started working on policy for the CDFI industry. I led the industry’s efforts to create the CDFI Fund in the U.S. Department of the Treasury and to defeat serious efforts to eliminate the Fund. We have won time and again for a few key reasons:
We are focused on making transformative changes in socially and economically disadvantaged places without regard to party politics. As a result, the industry has earned broad and deep bipartisan respect and support.
CDFIs bring people together across differences. Our supporters include people who might not agree on many things besides the value of CDFIs. When we advocate, we do so with the backing of business owners, developers, community leaders, community residents, racial and ethnic justice advocates, and many others.
CDFIs are “capillaries of the financial system.” Elected officials—all of them—know someone who needed access to finance and couldn’t get it anywhere else. We reach as far as we need to, so we are valuable to politicians, as well as to people in the communities we serve.
We have a deep store of compelling narratives showing people overcoming the odds when they get the opportunity. Regardless of party identity, elected officials want to support opportunity through hard work.
Finally, CDFIs have made loans in 100% of U.S. congressional districts and Senate states over the past 18 years. You cannot underestimate how important this is—there is nowhere that CDFIs have not been, even while we want to do more in many places.
The Trump Administration’s proposed 2026 budget preserves only minimal support for certifications and operating the New Markets Tax Credit and the Bond Guarantee Programs.
The Administration wants to reduce CDFIs to just another type of financial institution and assumes that the purpose of the CDFI Fund is to serve CDFIs. In fact, the purpose of CDFIs is to lift up socially and economically disadvantaged people and places; CDFIs are the means, not the ends.
Trump also criticized prior funding for promoting racial equity and climate resiliency, both topics the Trump Administration has characterized as “woke” and “extremist”. The fact of the matter is that there is a powerful correlation between economic distress (people and places with economic needs) and race. For all practical purposes, working to reduce economic distress (as indicated by the CDFI Fund’s Qualified Investment Areas) requires CDFIs to focus disproportionately on people and communities of color. In addition, the correlation between places with adverse economic conditions and adverse, climate-related social, economic, and environmental conditions is undeniable.
More than ever, CDFIs are essential lifelines for under-financed and undervalued places, financing the small businesses, nonprofits, affordable housing, commercial developers, and consumers. The CDFI Fund enables CDFIs to do more. We see the important role CDFIs play in the communities we’ve worked with and around the country.
Telling the stories of how we work with underserved borrowers, one person, one transaction, one community at a time, is necessary, but it is not sufficient in the current policy context.
Our Maps for CDFI Advocacy
We need to step up with a more compelling explanation of the work CDFIs do (bringing financial system infrastructure to under-performing markets), the reasons they do it (because no one else can or will), and the value they create. We need to make an unassailable case with data, beyond what the industry has done in the past.
We created the CDFI Market Map and the CDFI Advocacy Map to help CDFIs do that. Both are free, and both present data that is not currently available anywhere else in easy-to-use forms.
Our maps present real-world data that show how individual borrower stories are multiplied thousands of times over in an array of geographies. The CDFI Market Map identifies almost 1,300 “CDFI Opportunity Markets” across the U.S., places with high levels of economic distress and low historical levels of CDFI financing. They represent growth markets for CDFIs. Identifying which census tracts are well-served by CDFIs and which are not within a city, for example, leads to important discussions about policy, financing, and more.
In the Advocacy Map, we organized the data by congressional district, allowing congresspeople to focus like never before on what is and isn’t getting done in their communities. Those data make a compelling systemic case that CDFIs are important not only because of what they have done in the past but because they are the best type of financial institutions to step up to do much more going forward.
This map makes it possible to see things that were invisible before. We need to let the Republicans in Congress and in the White House know, counter to what most people assume, that roughly two-thirds (67%) of all CDFI financing since 2005 has gone to states that voted for President Trump in 2024!
That’s why we created the CDFI Advocacy Map and released it for public use in February.
This free, interactive resource enables you to:
Show how much CDFI lending has occurred in every congressional district and state over the past 18 years. Do your representatives and Senators know all that you and other CDFIs have done?
Compare the CDFI lending per capita average in districts and states to the national average. Are they over-performing or under-performing against the national benchmark?
View the total CDFI lending by census tract. Why is so much getting done in some places but not in others?
To better show the impact of your CDFI or your CDFI Coalition’s lending, we are creating custom interactive maps for CDFIs to use and share. For example, right now we are finishing work with a CDFI to show its CDFI lending by type of loan down to City Council district levels.
Our custom mapping tools can include all of the CDFI Advocacy Map information as a backdrop to your CDFI’s transaction-level data, down to the census tract or loan address. To learn more about custom mapping, click the button below.
Conclusion
To succeed in restoring funding to the CDFI Fund’s core financial assistance programs for next year, CDFIs need to step up their advocacy in quantity, quality, and approach. Warm borrower stories are important, but we now have the capacity to go deeper so that our elected officials understand that CDFIs are not just nice to have, they are essential.
Mark Pinsky
President & Founder
