The progressive movement has declared war on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and its chair, Mary Jo White. An uncoordinated yet scathing series of reports, letters and appeals have honed in on the New Deal-era regulatory body. And the fight is really about the agency’s long-term direction, as vacancies on the commission open up: Will it maintain the same industry-friendly posture of light-touch regulatory enforcement and ineffective rulemaking, or can a shift be made? Given the growing importance of the SEC, reformers are using whatever leverage they have to influence the outcome.

You might believe Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 13-page letter to White, expressing personal disappointment with her tenure, kicked off this uproar. But separately, a growing discontent with the SEC has emerged within the financial reform community, and even within the agency itself. Former officials have called the SEC dysfunctional and even warned colleagues from joining up.

White, a political independent, has had two reliable reformers on the five-member commission, Democrats Kara Stein and Luis Aguilar. But she has not moved forward on any rulemaking that deviates from the narrow interests of a myopic career staff. Indeed, the pace of rule-writing has been amazingly slow, with agenda items dating back to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law still awaiting final rules. Experts point to gridlock between Democrats and Republicans on the panel, and White’s lack of experience with financial policymaking.

Enforcement, where White at least had some background, has been even more unsatisfactory, with White ignoring pervasive misconduct, tallying up few big cases and often siding with Republican commissioners to lighten punishment. Stein, the more blunt of the two Democrats, has repeatedly spoken publicly against the agency waiving automatic penalties for companies convicted of criminal fraud, most recently for Deutsche Bank after they pled guilty to rigging the benchmark LIBOR interest rate. “It was a complete criminal fraud upon the worldwide marketplace,” Stein said, yet Deutsche Bank was allowed to retain business lines they are supposed to lose after criminal convictions.

The former head of enforcement to the SEC, Robert Khuzami, and more recently Mary Jo White’s chief counsel Robert Rice, are Deutsche Bank alumni. The current general counsel at Deutsche Bank, Richard Walker, is another former SEC chief of enforcement. The incestuous relationship between this leading Wall Street regulator and the industry it regulates has been a longtime concern, and White has displayed a clear continuity with that trend.