Mother Jones

Five years after the financial crash, most congressional Democrats seem content to live with the status quo. They tackled financial reform in 2010 when they passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and they’d prefer to leave the nitty-gritty details of keeping banks in check to federal agencies rather than pass new legislation.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won’t be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and senate aides, that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. “Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?” she said. “I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That’s what oversight means. And that’s certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis.”

She noted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency she conceived of and helped guide to formation, has met its deadlines for writing rules. But the other federal agencies have been an utter failure at keeping to the schedule laid out by Dodd-Frank. A recent report by Davis Polk found that 60 percent of deadlines had been missed. Thirty percent of Dodd-Frank-mandated rules haven’t even been proposed yet, let alone finalized.

Warren spoke at an event assessing the state of financial reform hosted by Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and the Roosevelt Institute. The two organizations released a 125-page report Tuesday outlining where Dodd-Frank has succeeded and failed, with a heavy emphasis on where the act failed to tame the biggest banks’ risky activities and how they still expose the entire economy to risk should they collapse.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Regulators for Keeping Banks “Too Big to Fail”