By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
Congressman Spencer Bachus (R) from Vestavia announced Tuesday that the U.S. House Financial Services Committee had unveiled the new Dodd-Frank Burden Tracker website. Rep. Bachus said the site is an online resource to help the public follow “all the new government rules and red tape required by the Dodd-Frank Act.”
Rep. Bachus is the Chairman of the House financial Services Committee. In his written statement, “This online resource will help the public better understand how the cumulative weight of these new rules – layered upon existing outdated, unnecessary and duplicative red tape – hurts small businesses and financial institutions. They have to spend increasing amounts of time and money dealing with all this red tape instead of engaging in the activities that grow our economy and create jobs.”
Rep. Neugebauer is the Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Rep. Neugebauer said, “It will take over 24 million man hours to comply with Dodd-Frank rules per year. It took only 20 million to build the Panama Canal. Banks and credit unions, retirement funds and other financial institutions will be forced to spend a large portion of their budgets trying to comply with Dodd-Frank rules rather than lending to small businesses and American consumers and investing in our economy. While the promised benefits of Dodd-Frank are still illusory, the costs are beginning to become crystal clear.”
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, was passed by a Democratic Party Controlled Congress in 2010. Rep. Bachus’s written statement said that Dodd-Frank mandates that government regulators write over 400 new rules and requirements that will be imposed on the private sector. To this point they have written 185 of the 400 new rules. Those 185 rules are 5,320 pages long. Rep. Bachus estimates that it will take private sector businesses 24,035,801 hours a year to comply with the less than half of the new rules we already know about. The House Financial Services Committee will update the Burden Tracker as more Dodd-Frank rules are written.
Obama’s new Consumer Protection Bureau is just a small part of Dodd-Frank. In January Senator Shelby said, “The Bureau is budgeted to receive a total of $329 million in funds from the Federal Reserve Board this year. This could grow to well over a half a billion dollars as early as next year. By design, these payments are made directly to the Bureau without any oversight through the congressional appropriations process. It is also my understanding that the Bureau has already hired 800 people, and it has been reported that the Bureau hopes to hire as many as 1,000 people by the end of this year, some making more than $225,000 per year. How have my Democrat colleagues in the Senate responded to this incredible bureaucratic expansion? They have resisted every Republican effort to make the Bureau more accountable to the American people by changing its structure. To make things worse, they have also cut this Committee’s funding by 25% making it even more difficult to oversee these massive bureaucracies that are growing in power and size under Dodd-Frank”
The Dodd-Frank Burden Tracker can be found on the Financial Services Committee’s website at
