Improving Federal Financial Management Act
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Sen. Lankford, James [R-OK]
ID: L000575
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
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2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another brilliant example of legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed Senator Lankford and his cohorts in Congress. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Improving Federal Financial Management Act (S 75) claims to aim at modifying the governmentwide financial management plan, because, apparently, the current system is a hot mess. The bill promises to "improve" financial management by introducing new performance metrics, enhancing accountability, and streamlining reporting requirements.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill makes several changes to existing law, including:
* Expanding the duties of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) to include overseeing budget formulation, risk management, and internal controls. * Introducing a new agency plan to implement the 4-year financial management plan prepared by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). * Requiring CFOs to prepare performance-based financial management metrics and submit them to Congress and other stakeholders. * Enhancing reporting requirements for agencies, including the submission of annual financial statements.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects are affected:
* Federal agencies, which will have to comply with new reporting requirements and performance metrics. * CFOs, who will have to take on additional responsibilities and prepare more reports. * Congress, which will receive more paperwork to pretend to care about. * The OMB, which will get to dictate the terms of the 4-year financial management plan.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** Let's be real; this bill is a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It's a token effort to address the systemic issues plaguing federal financial management. The changes proposed are minor and won't address the root causes of inefficiency, waste, and corruption.
In reality, this bill will:
* Increase bureaucratic red tape and reporting requirements, further bogging down already inefficient agencies. * Provide more opportunities for politicians to grandstand about "accountability" while doing nothing meaningful to address the real problems. * Allow CFOs to pad their resumes with more meaningless metrics and reports, rather than actually improving financial management.
In short, this bill is a classic example of legislative placebo: it looks like something is being done, but in reality, it's just more empty calories for the bureaucratic machine.
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Sen. Lankford, James [R-OK]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 830 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Three basic categories of firm: private firms, an intermediate category of smaller firms,4 and public firms; l Reasonable, scaled disclosure requirements; and l Specified secondary markets for the securities of these firms.5 The SEC needs to be reformed to achieve its important core functions more effectively, to improve transparency and due process, and to reduce unnecessary regulatory impediments to capital formation.6 Under current law, the SEC Chair- man has the authority to make almost all of the necessary changes.7 Unfortunately, financial regulators, particularly the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), are poorly managed and organized. With regulatory authority delegated by the government, both the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and FINRA have proved to be ineffective, costly, opaque, and largely impervious to reform. To reduce costs and improve transparency, due process, congressional oversight, and responsiveness, PCAOB and FINRA should be abolished, and their regulatory functions should be merged into the SEC. Furthermore, Congress should establish an indepen- dent board or commission and charge it with producing a detailed report within 18 months that examines the degree to which the regulatory functions of the var- ious other so-called self-regulatory organizations (SROs), which are no longer self-regulatory in any meaningful sense, should be moved to the SEC.8 Discrimination based on immutable characteristics has no place in financial regulation. Offices at financial regulators that promote racist policies (usually in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) should be abolished, and regulations that require appointments on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation should be eliminated. Equal protection of the law, equal opportunity, and individ- ual merit should govern regulatory decisions.9 Congress has given the SEC broad “general exemptive authority,”10 but the SEC has used this authority only rarely. It should use this authority significantly more often to reduce the regulatory burden on issuers, particularly smaller entrepreneurs. ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPITAL FORMATION Financial regulators should remove regulatory impediments to entrepreneur- ial capital formation.11 In the absence of the fundamental reform outlined above, the SEC should: l Simplify and streamline Regulation A (the small issues exemption)12 and Regulation CF (crowdfunding)13 and preempt blue sky registration and quali- fication requirements for all primary and secondary Regulation A offerings.14 — 831 — Financial Regulatory Agencies l Either democratize access to private offerings by broadening the definition of accredited investor for purposes of Regulation D or eliminate the accredited investor restriction altogether.15 l Allow traditional self-certification of accredited investor status for all Regulation D Rule 506 offerings. l Exempt small micro-offerings from registration requirements.16 l Exempt small and intermittent finders from broker–dealer registration requirements and provide a simplified registration process for private placement brokers.17 l Exempt peer-to-peer lending from federal and state securities laws and reduce the regulatory burden on Regulation CF debt securities. l Make the Title I Emerging Growth Company (EGC) exemptions permanent for all EGCs. l Reduce the regulatory burden on small broker–dealers and exempt privately held, non-custodial broker–dealers from the requirements to use a PCAOB- registered firm for their audits. Congress should: l Amend the Internal Revenue Code to disregard crowdfunding and Regulation A shareholders for purposes of the 100-shareholder limit for Subchapter S corporations.18 BETTER CAPITAL MARKETS To improve capital markets, the SEC should: l Preempt blue sky registration, qualification, and continuing reporting requirements for securities traded on established securities markets (including a national securities exchange or an alternative trading system).19 l Terminate the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) program.20 l Abolish Rule 144 and other regulations that restrict securities resales and instead require a company that has sold securities to provide sufficient current informa- tion to the market to permit reasonable investment decisions and secondary sales.
Introduction
— 830 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Three basic categories of firm: private firms, an intermediate category of smaller firms,4 and public firms; l Reasonable, scaled disclosure requirements; and l Specified secondary markets for the securities of these firms.5 The SEC needs to be reformed to achieve its important core functions more effectively, to improve transparency and due process, and to reduce unnecessary regulatory impediments to capital formation.6 Under current law, the SEC Chair- man has the authority to make almost all of the necessary changes.7 Unfortunately, financial regulators, particularly the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), are poorly managed and organized. With regulatory authority delegated by the government, both the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and FINRA have proved to be ineffective, costly, opaque, and largely impervious to reform. To reduce costs and improve transparency, due process, congressional oversight, and responsiveness, PCAOB and FINRA should be abolished, and their regulatory functions should be merged into the SEC. Furthermore, Congress should establish an indepen- dent board or commission and charge it with producing a detailed report within 18 months that examines the degree to which the regulatory functions of the var- ious other so-called self-regulatory organizations (SROs), which are no longer self-regulatory in any meaningful sense, should be moved to the SEC.8 Discrimination based on immutable characteristics has no place in financial regulation. Offices at financial regulators that promote racist policies (usually in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) should be abolished, and regulations that require appointments on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation should be eliminated. Equal protection of the law, equal opportunity, and individ- ual merit should govern regulatory decisions.9 Congress has given the SEC broad “general exemptive authority,”10 but the SEC has used this authority only rarely. It should use this authority significantly more often to reduce the regulatory burden on issuers, particularly smaller entrepreneurs. ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPITAL FORMATION Financial regulators should remove regulatory impediments to entrepreneur- ial capital formation.11 In the absence of the fundamental reform outlined above, the SEC should: l Simplify and streamline Regulation A (the small issues exemption)12 and Regulation CF (crowdfunding)13 and preempt blue sky registration and quali- fication requirements for all primary and secondary Regulation A offerings.14
Introduction
— 836 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2. FINRA’s Board of Governors’ agenda be made available to the public in advance. 3. Board minutes describing actions taken be published without delay. 4. FINRA make available to the public in advance rulemakings that the FINRA board is expected to consider. 5. FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings should be open to the public and reported. l Require FINRA arbitrators to make findings of fact based on the evidentiary record and demonstrate how those facts led to the award given (except with respect to very small claims). These written FINRA arbitration decisions should be subject to SEC review and limited judicial review. l Require that all SRO fines, including those imposed by FINRA, should go either to a newly established investor reimbursement fund or to the Treasury. SROs should not have a financial interest in imposing fines. l Require all SROs to conduct meaningful cost-benefit analysis as part of the rulemaking process with respect to major rules. l Require all SROs to publish rules in proposed format and seek public comment before they are submitted to the SEC or the CFTC. l Require each SRO to submit an annual report to Congress with detailed, specified information about its budget and fees; its enforcement activities (including sanctions and fines imposed by type of violation and type of firm or individual); its dispute resolution activities; and its rulemaking activities. Congress should: l Conduct annual oversight hearings on SROs. l Either make FINRA, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), and the National Futures Association (NFA) “Designated Federal Entities” and establish an inspector general with respect to financial SROs, including FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA or place FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA within the ambit of an existing inspector general.
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.