Bart Chilton, the colorful, mullet-sporting member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), resigned this week, after casting a final vote to set position limits, which would regulate the number of commodity trades individual speculators can hold. Chilton’s farewell speech focused on his 5-year odyssey in support of a rule on position limits, which was finished, then overturned by the courts in 2012, then rewritten to answer the judicial challenges. He described it as his final piece of unfinished business. He also included a familiar farewell sentiment, which, in his case, was probably especially true: “It’s with incredible excitement and enthusiasm that I look forward to being able to move on to other endeavors.”

You can hardly blame Chilton for being excited to leave the CFTC. The chief regulator for over $300 trillion worth of derivatives trades has seen its operations squeezed by drastic underfunding, right at the time the Dodd-Frank financial reform law dropped a whole new set of responsibilities in its lap. While the rule-writing process is important—and Wall Street lobbyists have fought hard for exemptions and loopholes on derivatives rules—the lack of resources has made rules almost irrelevant, since the CFTC simply cannot enforce them. The agency is being hollowed out from the inside, yet another way that the financial industry can achieve its goal of gaining the freedom to ignore the law in pursuit of profit.

Dodd-Frank rewrote the rules for over-the-counter derivatives (or “swaps”), putting most of them under regulation for the first time. These opaque bets on bets played a major role in the financial crisis, magnifying the collapse of the housing market and spreading the damage throughout the financial system. The lack of transparency revealed a hole in the regulatory framework; companies like AIG could issue massive amounts of risky swaps without regulators’ awareness. So Congress decided that, instead of negotiating trades over the phone in private, the over-the-counter derivatives market would have to be transparent, traded on open exchanges, with the data available to market participants and their overseers. The 17 exchanges, known as swap execution facilities, post the price and volume of all trades, bringing this shadow market into the open for the CFTC to monitor. We no longer would have to guess about the exposure of big banks and financial firms to these risky bets.

Except the CFTC does have to guess, basically. The swap execution facilities launched on October 1, the same day 95 percent of agency staff were forced onto furlough by the government shutdown, and the agency has been playing catch-up ever since. But the problems go back much further than that. Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a leading reform coalition in Washington, puts it simply: “(CFTC) is the only financial regulatory agency that’s not at least partially self-funded.” While other agencies impose fees on the businesses they regulate and collect fines from regulatory enforcement to fund operations, the CFTC has never had authority to do so. This means that Congress alone holds the purse strings for the agency, and can use its discretion to effectively gut reforms by limiting resources. Particularly since the Republican takeover of the House in 2011, Congress has done just that.

The annual operating budget for the CFTC stands at $205 million. For context, Marcus Stanley notes, the information technology budget for just one multinational bank is $2.4 billion, over 10 times as much. In an arms race between traders and their primary regulator, it’s simply no contest. The CFTC budget has increased around 85 percent over the past five years, but that’s not nearly enough to manage the new responsibilities under Dodd-Frank, particularly to do the work of aggregating derivatives data, identifying patterns and determining where risk is pooling. The nominal value of the markets the CFTC must regulate has ballooned to well over $340 trillion, from $40 trillion prior to Dodd-Frank, a nearly ten-fold increase. Dealing with this significant new burden requires both innovation and a bigger labor force. But with a staff of 672, the agency only has 40 more employees than it did 20 years ago, according to Chairman Gary Gensler, who is also departing the CFTC at the end of the year