Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Chairman, my amendment does one very simple thing, which is to increase the funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission by $50 million, bringing the funding in this bill for the Securities and Exchange Commission to the level of funding for the SEC in 2016.

I would point out, Mr. Chairman, that this level of funding is still significantly lower than the President's request of $1.78 billion.

I would further point out, Mr. Chairman, that the work of the SEC, at its core, is about protecting investors who are essential to the functioning of our capital markets and to protecting the long-term sustainability of the U.S. financial system.

Mr. Chairman, as I think this body knows, the Dodd-Frank Act--which I understand is controversial in this Chamber, but which has gone a very long way to avoiding the kind of meltdown that we had in 2008 and which destroyed $17 trillion in American asset value at its worst--as well as the JOBS Act, which attracted strong bipartisan support in this Chamber, those two bills required the SEC to write some 70 new regulations. And yet despite that requirement and all of the advocacy that we saw, particularly from my friends on the Republican side of the aisle for more alacrity in the writing of the rules for the JOBS Act, we are now seeing a real cut in the budget for the SEC.

Just to give you a sense of what the SEC does, it is now responsible for overseeing some 26,000 market participants and over 9,000 public companies. The assets managed by SEC-registered investment advisers have increased 210 percent since 2005 to almost $70 trillion. That is a lot of money. That is a lot of investment.

This is an organization which is really essential to one of the chief competitive advantages that the United States has, which is the liquidity and the respect that the world has for our capital markets. Again, $50 million bringing the SEC up to the level of funding that it had last year.

And as a final point, let me point out that the SEC is funded not by taxes, but by fees that it collects.

So this would not have the effect of cutting another program or of raising anybody's taxes; but it would, in fact, simply authorize $50 million in fees that would be used for the SEC's budget.

I would like to thank the chairman and the ranking member for the opportunity to offer this amendment, and I would like to thank the cosponsors of this amendment, Representatives Maloney, Hinojosa, Perlmutter, and Sewell.

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentleman's perspective, but I disagree. He is correct that, in fact, the funding for the SEC has risen in the last 8 years, but so has the dramatic amount of work that is required of it.

Mr. Chair, I will close with just one important point, which is that we saw over the course of the last 2 weeks the dramatic market volatility that was introduced by Great Britain's decision to remove itself from the EU. There was not a stock market or an asset market anywhere on the globe that didn't suffer a significant jolt. These are moments of uncertainty--maybe even of chaos--in the capital markets.

We have a fairly significant election coming up this November. We are not looking at a moment in which the capital markets are likely to experience smooth sailing off into the foreseeable future.

We saw, in the last 2 weeks, precisely the volatility that warrants the need to have a cop on the beat to watch. This is not the moment to cut the SEC's funding. I would urge my colleagues in this Chamber to pass this amendment and to fully fund the cop that we need on this beat.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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