As early as today the U.S. House Financial Services will vote on a bill aimed at reforming our nation’s troubled financial system by creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. This agency would do the same thing for financial products that the Food and Drug Administration does for medical safety and the Consumer Products Safety Commission does for products like toys and electronics: set common sense rules to keep institutions from peddling bad mortgages and loans that destroy families’ financial futures. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency could have headed this financial crisis off at the pass by preventing millions of mortgages with wildly adjustable rates and exploding payments from ever entering the market.

Today, the House Financial Services Committee deliberates over crucial provisions in the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) Act. One of these is an amendment, proposed by Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL), that would stop states from enforcing their own consumer protection laws if they’re stronger than federal laws, turning the CFPA into a ceiling, not a floor.

As the debate on financial services reform continues in Washington, a new report finds that key decision makers in Congress have received sizable donations from the very industry they are seeking to reform.

If we hadn’t been waiting for a decade to see regulators and banks take consumer protection seriously, then their recent moves might be welcomed more enthusiastically. Instead, we view the recent efforts by regulators and banks to embrace consumer protection as cynical attempts to undercut the growing movement for consumer protection and financial reform.

In our fragmented regulatory system, agencies charged with overseeing banks lowered consumer protection standards in the interest of self-preservation, even as whole segments of the financial industry went unsupervised. 

A common banking industry argument against the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) is that the agency would restrict consumer choice. According to a new poll from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), Americans have already made a choice: they want more financial protections—and a new federal agency to enforce them.