It’s been more than 10 months since President Barack Obama signed massive financial regulatory reform legislation into law, but the special interests it directly affects are sustaining a federal lobbying onslaught now aimed at shaping the law’s implementation.

In all, 488 companies, trade associations, unions and other groups reported lobbying on the Democrats’ financial regulatory reform law during the first quarter of 2011, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of documents filed earlier this year with the U.S. Senate.

That’s nearly as many organizations that lobbied on it as during the entire year of 2009, when the proposal began coursing its way through Congress.

Two years ago, 501 companies and other organizations explicitly mentioned lobbying on the Dodd-Frank legislation in their lobbying reports. The legislation is named after its chief congressional sponsors, then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and then-House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Furthermore, these lobbyists are targeting like never before several federal agencies that play significant roles in financial sector regulation — continuing a trend OpenSecrets Blog first noted in November.

Strikingly, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency all saw more lobbying activity during the first quarter of 2011 by groups interested in the Dodd-Frank regulations than in any other quarter since Obama took office, according to the Center’s analysis.

Lobbying targeting the Securities and Exchange Commission by these clients, meanwhile, represented the second-highest quarterly amount since Obama took office — almost at its fourth-quarter 2010 level,.

Among other responsibilities, the CFTC and SEC will be responsible for implementing new regulations on derivatives, the investment vehicles that have been almost completely unregulated, have often allowed investors to make risky bets and that played a substantial role in causing the nation’s economic crisis.

The FDIC, too, is responsible for multiple initiatives related to the Dodd-Frank regulations, as is the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. On May 25, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed a rule to implement certain provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act mandating subsidiaries of national banks to follow state consumer protection laws.

At the peak of lobbying interest in the Wall Street reform legislation — the second quarter of 2010 — 815 companies and other organizations reported lobbying on the Dodd-Frank legislation.

During the third quarter of 2010, this number fell to 734, and during the fourth quarter of 2010, it fell again to 590. (That level of activity represented about 5 percent of all organizations and special interests that lobbied the federal government on any issue, as OpenSecrets Blog previously reported.)

The hundreds of groups and companies that have lobbied on Dodd-Frank since Obama took office have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on all of their federal lobbying. It’s impossible to precisely know how much has been spent on specifically targeting the Dodd-Frank law, however, because lobbying disclosure rules do not required an itemized reporting of expenses on a per issue basis. Rather, companies and other organizations disclose one top-line number for their overall lobbying expenditures, for all issues they lobby on each quarter.

Additionally, since Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, GOP lawmakers — many backed by the financial sector interests — have actively been pushing legislation to repeal the Dodd-Frank law regulations.

Center for Responsive Politics research director Jihan Andoni contributed to this report.



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