Mary Schapiro, left, told senators that the SEC doesn’t 'have the capacity' for more responsibility. | REUTERS GOP tries to slash Wall Street law

The federal agencies charged with enforcing last year’s Wall Street reform law are starving for money, short staffed and worried about being able to implement the far-reaching crackdown on the financial industry.

And that’s exactly what top Republicans in charge of banking and Wall Street oversight want.


As top key administration officials appeared before the Senate banking committee on Thursday to plead for more money to enforce the so-called Dodd-Frank act, Republicans admitted that they were aiming to dismantle and defund the law.

“We should slow a lot of that down,” said Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the panel. “A lot of us voted against and oppose Dodd-Frank. Obviously, we’d repeal it. So I certainly don’t think we should rush to implement it.”

When asked whether taking down funding levels is a “legitimate” way to slow the process of implementation, Shelby responded: “Always.”

The stalled continuing resolution bill being debated in the House is threatening funding for the financial reform law, and agencies need more money by a July deadline if they’re going to start enforcing a wide range of new rules.

But there’s a risk for Shelby and other Republicans who want to break up the Wall Street law — financial reform didn’t rattle voters the same way the health debate did. The GOP will have a tougher case to make against Dodd-Frank while still appearing sensitive to the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown and its residual effects.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) warned Thursday that failure to fund the reform law will be “a step backwards, and it is a dangerous step for the American economy.”

But at the rate Congress is going on the fiscal 2011 continuing resolution, Shelby’s hoped-for “slowdown” is more of a possibility than the law’s most vocal Democratic supporters would like to admit.

The two agencies hit hardest by the failure to pass a full 2011 budget are the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Both the SEC and the CFTC — which were given a substantial increase in power by the regulatory reform law — were slated to get significant funding bumps this year. The chiefs of both agencies said Thursday they don’t have the resources for day-to-day operations, let alone enough manpower to deal with the workload of implementing the sweeping overhaul.

The president called for the SEC budget to grow from $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion in fiscal 2012 and asked for an allocation of $308 million for the much smaller CFTC, up from the agency’s $168 million budget prior to the passage of the Wall Street reform bill.

House Republicans cut funding levels for both agencies, however, slashing $56.8 million from the CFTC and $25 million from the SEC. Republicans have also called for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — perhaps their least favorite part of the law — to receive $80 million, a significant cut from the $143 million the agency had hoped for.

SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro told senators that the agency doesn’t “have the capacity” currently to take on the additional responsibilities required by Dodd-Frank.

“With respect to our current core functions, we are feeling the pressure of the continuing resolution,” Schapiro said. “In order to operationalize any of the rules we are writing, we will need more funds.”

CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler had an even more dire outlook.

“If [the CFTC] were to return to the 2008 levels, we wouldn’t be able to fulfill our statutory mission,” Gensler said.

But none of these concerns seemed to rattle Republicans, who didn’t seem troubled by the problems the government might have enforcing the Dodd-Frank law.

In the hearing’s most telling moment, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker asked the Obama officials whether it would “make sense” for Congress to try to slow down regulators who admitted they are under duress because of budgetary constraints.

“I’ve heard from a number of them about the problems they’re having because of funding,” Corker said after the hearing. “You don’t have the staff you need. A lot of people are concerned about how rapidly these regulations are being created and how much real thought is going into them, so might it make sense, because of the budgetary issues our country is dealing with and them directly, might it make sense just to slow the process down so they’re not rushing through implementing things that could create?”

But Democrats, who still staunchly defend the law they passed on mostly a party-line vote, aren’t buying the move and vow to fight for funding.

New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez told the banking committee Thursday he is concerned that if Democrats allow funding for the agencies to dry up, passing Dodd-Frank will amount to a “hollow promise to the American people of what we said we were going to do.”

And Durbin, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the SEC and CFTC, was even more emphatic in his message to Republicans.

“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure they have the resources. I have the SEC and the CFTC in my appropriations subcommittee,” Durbin said. “What Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans want to do will devastate their current responsibilities, and they’ll be unable to even get close to the responsibilities under Dodd-Frank.”

Underneath the rhetoric for and against the law from both parties is the reality of the budget fight on the Hill. The temporary funding resolution passed last December, which did not include funds to support Dodd-Frank, is set to expire in March. House Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Wednesday he’s already dispatched Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) to work on another temporary measure.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the Wall Street law’s namesakes, introduced an amendment to the House funding resolution that would increase SEC funding by offsetting it with funds transferred from the treasury. Though the House was slated to vote on the amendment Thursday, it’s unlikely to have an impact, as the reform law is unpopular with the GOP majority and Obama already has promised to veto the House version of the bill.

Despite the tricky legislative logistics, fighting for the Wall Street reform law could still give Democrats space for a political victory. The measure is significantly more popular than its health care counterpart, and the specter of a market crash that continues to affect Main Street economy still looms.

“We’re going to try to make the argument that, without a robust regulatory scheme, we’d be in danger again of another fiscal crisis,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a top member of the banking committee, told POLITICO. “To keep what we did under the Bush administration — to deregulate by defunding — could lead us exactly back to the crisis we saw in ’08 and ’09 and particularly now in a much different marketplace.”