Reuters/Brendan McDermid
Reuters – By John Kemp – June 7, 2012
(Reuters) – Politics is brutal. Just how brutal became apparent Wednesday when Wall Street teamed up with Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to emasculate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by slashing its budget while imposing new requirements for cost-benefit analysis and rule-writing.
The aim is to stop the agency implementing the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act by depriving it of resources needed to draft and oversee new regulations, while erecting tougher barriers to writing new rules.
The agriculture appropriations bill for fiscal 2013, approved by a House Appropriations subcommittee on June 6 along party lines, would cut the agency’s funding next year by $25 million (12 percent) compared with fiscal 2012. This is a massive $128 million (40 percent) less than the administration requested in its budget proposals.
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