WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The futures regulator would get a 12 percent budget cut in the coming fiscal year in a bill approved by a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, with its chairman saying the agency was doing a lackluster job.
The panel approved $180.4 million budget for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a cut of $25 million, as part of a funding bill for the Agriculture Department and related agencies for fiscal 2013 opening on Oct 1.
On an 8-5 party-line vote, the subcommittee defeated a proposal by Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro to give the agency $308 million, the Obama administration request. DeLauro said she would try again when the full Appropriations Committee debates the bill in mid-June.
"They were asleep on the job," said subcommittee chairman Jack Kingston, Georgia Republican, in faulting CFTC performance during the collapse of trading house MF Global. Kingston said CFTC was tardy in implementing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and slow in developing electronic monitoring of markets.
DeLauro and other Democrats said budget cutting would hobble CFTC as its workload grew with the Dodd-Frank legislation, which brought federal oversight to the vast and unregulated over-the-counter derivatives market.
(Reporting By Charles Abbott; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)
