Commodity End-User Relief Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this bill; yet again, this bill deliberately sets out to weaken one of our most important financial regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

It fails to address the CFTC's biggest challenge, its flawed funding mechanism. It prioritizes Wall Street special interests over the economic security of our Nation's families.

This bill is a recipe for another financial disaster like the one that led to the Great Recession and cost nearly 9 million American jobs.

Americans are tired of casino banking and speculation. They want big banks and oil speculators held accountable. They want to increase the transparency of our markets, prevent market failures, and avoid future bailouts. That is the CFTC's job.

This bill takes us in the wrong direction. Instead of helping the CFTC fulfill its mandate in an increasingly complex global financial sector, the bill throws up roadblock after roadblock.

The CFTC is one of only two Federal financial regulators completely reliant upon the general fund. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Housing Finance Agency, and a host of others all collect user fees, so should the CFTC.

This is not a partisan proposition. The first President to propose user-fee funding for the CFTC was Ronald Reagan. Every President since then, Republican or Democrat, has done the same.

User fees would directly reduce the deficit while securing CFTC's funding for the long term. That is even more important now that the agency's responsibilities have been expanded in response to the bad behavior that created the financial crisis.

I submitted an amendment that would have dealt with this problem, but the majority refused to allow it to be heard.

We must avoid at all costs a return to the conditions that allowed the Great Recession to happen, and I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.

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