Regulators say agency budget cuts hurt rule-making

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal regulators tasked with implementing key parts of the financial regulatory law complained Thursday on Capitol Hill that Congress is restricting their efforts by limiting their budgets.

Mary Schapiro, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told a Senate hearing that SEC's funding so far for this year is having "real impacts" on the agency's work.

It is crimping the "core mission, our ability to hire examiners to travel for enforcement cases, and most particularly to build the technology we need to really do the job that's right in front of us at this moment," Schapiro told the Senate Banking Committee.

The comments were echoed by another top regulator at a hearing in which heads of key agencies gave a six-month status report on the law. The law was enacted last summer to protect the country from another financial crisis like the one that hit in 2008.

Republican senators on the panel, however, said the rushed pace of rule-making may have hurt the quality of the new regulations. The potential costs to businesses affected by the rules could be staggering and aren't being properly estimated by the regulators, they said.

The hearing took place at a time when Republicans in Congress want to cut spending for federal agencies by tens of billions of dollars in the current budget year.

Congress has been at an impasse over federal spending for the current budget year, which began in October. Lawmakers have passed short-term, stopgap funding measures to keep the government running, a few months at a time.

The Obama administration is asking Congress to increase the SEC's budget to $1.4 billion for next fiscal year from the current $1.1 billion.

Gary Gensler, who heads the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said his agency has had to make hard choices.

The CFTC's technology budget was about $31 million last year and will probably have to be cut about 45 percent this year, Gensler said. "We're cutting travel and all the other things to be efficient, but technology is the key to move forward."

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the banking committee's senior Republican, complained that regulators have rushed to meet "unrealistic" deadlines for rule-making set by the overhaul law, and that may have hurt the quality of the new and proposed regulations.

"We should begin considering whether the final rules would be better if our regulators had more time to hear from the public," Shelby said.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., suggested it might make sense for Congress "to slow you guys down a little bit so that you have time to both invest in technology and hire people, and actually be slightly more thoughtful on the rule-making."