The Commodities Futures Trading Commission is one of the critical agencies in financial regulation. It regulates the commodity derivatives markets that help determine the price of every day items ranging from gasoline to bread. The Dodd-Frank Act also gave the CFTC responsibility for overseeing the vast and previously unregulated financial derivatives markets that helped crash the world economy in 2008. This increase in responsibilities led to an eight-fold growth in the size of the markets that the CFTC was responsible for, yet the CFTC’s funding is completely inadequate to fulfill its new oversight responsibilities. As detailed in the fact sheet and charts below, the CFTC is dramatically underfunded compared to both its regulatory responsibilities and administration requests.
CFTC Workload Versus Workforce