The Senate Budget Committee has just voted to end the independent funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), bringing it under the congressional appropriations process instead.

There should be no mistaking the intent or inevitable effect if this change were actually made: it would cripple the first and only financial regulator with a mandate to put consumers’ interests first. Like other bank oversight agencies, the CFPB is currently funded in a way that insulates it from financial-industry pressure. By approving an amendment offered by Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.), the Budget Committee is acting on behalf of Wall Street banks and predatory lenders who opposed the CFPB’s creation and have fought it since, precisely because they do not want it to succeed. If this measure became law, they know they could count on friendly lawmakers to use the power of the purse to keep the Bureau in line.

The result would be a green light for more of the tricks and traps that characterized the banking and lending world for too long, and that the CFPB is working to clean up. Abuses in consumer finance cost families many billions of dollars a year, and in 2008 mortgages rigged to fail led to a financial and economic disaster. It would be a disastrous mistake to go back.