The House approved a spending plan Thursday that no longer includes a provision rolling the NCUA budget under the congressional appropriations process.
On Wednesday, lawmakers approved an amendment to the 2018 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act (H.R. 3354) which removed a section in that bill that would have subjected the NCUA budget to annual congressional review in the appropriations process. The amendment, passed on voice vote, was offered by Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.).
H.R. 3354, as originally offered to the House, would have rolled the annual budgets of NCUA, OCC and the FDIC into the appropriations process. As independent agencies, their budgets are now outside of congressional approval. If the spending bill had become law as originally presented, it would have marked the first time the federal credit union regulator, as an independent regulator, would face congressional budget approval.
The Amodei-Aguilar amendment affected only NCUA; it was widely supported in the credit union industry, which argued that placing the agency under congressional appropriations processes would amount to a hidden tax on credit unions and their members.