Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor · Needs Congress

Set CFTC Commissioners' office funding by statute

Not started

834 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“To augment Commissioners’ independence, establish funding amounts for the Commissioners’ offices by statute with adjustments for inflation, with no requirement for a Commissioner to obtain budget or expense approvals from the Chairman or the agency’s administrative staff.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing sets the funding of the CFTC Commissioners' offices by statute. The CFTC receives one annual lump-sum appropriation for salaries and expenses plus a separate line for the Inspector General, and the Commission's own FY2027 budget book states that Salaries and Expenses and the Office of the Inspector General are "its sole PPAs" and that "All other budget displays by division or any other depictions are for informational purposes only" — so the Offices of the Chairman and the Commissioners have no statutory funding line, no inflation adjustment and no independence from internal budget approval. No bill of the 119th Congress would create one. The only funding change proposed for the agency runs the other way: the FY2027 Budget asks Congress for legislation authorizing user fees to offset the CFTC's entire $410 million appropriation.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The appropriation as it stands. The FY2027 Budget Appendix carries a single Commodity Futures Trading Commission salaries-and-expenses paragraph appropriating $410,000,000, with a carve-out of not less than $5,963,000 for the Inspector General and nothing for the Commissioners’ offices (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2027-APP/pdf/BUDGET-2027-APP-2-30.pdf). The Commission’s own budget book repeats the point in its footnotes to Tables 1 and 2 (https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/CFTC%20FY%202027%20President’s%20Budget%20Book_CFTCGOV.pdf, loaded 2026-09-01): the Offices of the Chairman and the Commissioners are shown at $14.5M in FY2025 actual, $18.4M enacted FY2026 and $19.4M requested FY2027, but that display is “for informational purposes only”. These are leads about what has not changed rather than Evidence of action, so they sit here.
  • No bill. bills.ndjson was grepped for CFTC, Commodity Futures, Commodity Exchange, futures, derivative and swap. The seven CFTC bills of the 119th Congress were all referred and none creates a statutory funding line for Commissioners’ offices.
  • Moving the other way, at one remove. Executive Order 14215 §5 directs OMB to review independent regulatory agencies’ obligations and to “adjust such agencies’ apportionments by activity, function, project, or object”, which may “prohibit independent regulatory agencies from expending appropriations on particular activities” (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/24/2025-03063/ensuring-accountability-for-all-agencies). That reduces budget autonomy inside the agency but the constraint comes from OMB rather than from the Chairman, which is what the Quote names, so it is recorded here as a lead and not attached to the event.
Action
create
Object
statutory funding for CFTC Commissioners’ offices
ID
2158