The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services today approved a spending bill for fiscal year 2016 that includes the text of the ABA-backed financial reform bill introduced earlier this year by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). Shelby’s proposal would provide regulatory relief for community, mid-size and regional banks, tailor the regulatory structure for systemically important banks and begin restructuring within the Federal Reserve System and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The appropriations process provides an alternative legislative mechanism for moving the regulatory relief provisions forward, including nearly two dozen measures that are part of ABA’s Agenda for America’s Hometown Banks, many of which have been introduced as standalone measures or in other relief packages in both houses of Congress.
“This is the five-year anniversary of Dodd-Frank,” said Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), who chairs the subcommittee. “We are losing community banks all the time because of one-size-fits-all and the compliance costs. This is just an effort to use every tool that we’ve got in an effort to provide them with some relief.”
In addition to the Shelby provisions, the spending bill would replace the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director with a five-member commission and bring the CFPB’s budget into the congressional appropriations process.
