The budget released yesterday by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — in addition to dismantling Medicare and Medicaid and laying the groundwork for a huge middle-class tax increase — contains a gift for Wall Street. In their budget, House Republicans proposed removing two key features of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law: the ability to designate certain financial firms as systemically risky, and thus subject them to higher regulation; and the resolution authority for unwinding giant, failed financial institutions.

But this is not the only way in which the House GOP is aiming to do Wall Street’s bidding. The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit held a hearing today on a series of legislative proposals that House Republicans have offered that would reduce the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The most prominent of these efforts has been legislation sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) that would change the CFPB from an agency with a single director to one run by a five-member commission. During the hearing, Bachus and the pro-bank lobbyists the GOP brought in to testify all sounded similar notes about the CFPB:

BACHUS: This is about giving one person total unbridled authority and power.

AMERICAN BANKERS ASSOCIATION: The resulting practically boundless grant of agency discretion is exacerbated by giving the head of the Bureau sole authority to make decisions that could fundamentally alter the financial choices available to customers.

U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: There is no other government official who serves for a fixed term, and is therefore exempt from Presidential control, exercises sole authority over an agency, and has sole power to spend hundreds of millions of dollars outside the congressional appropriation process.

Both the Chamber and the ABA — which represent the country’s biggest banks and did their best to scuttle financial reform before it became law — would like nothing more than to render the CFPB completely toothless. Chamber President Tom Donohue, in fact, has said that he wants the CFPB to “starve to death financially.” To that end, they’re using overblown rhetoric to describe an agency structure that’s quite typical.

After all, plenty of other agencies — including the banking regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the IRS, and many of the cabinet agencies — have single directors. Plus, the CFPB, unlike any other regulatory agency, can be overruled by another body: a two-thirds vote of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) can overturn CFPB rules.

As Georgetown Law Professor Adam Levitan testified, “switching to a five-member panel would tilt the balance at the agency to gridlock and inaction.” And for House Republicans and their allies in the banking industry, that’s precisely the point. Remember, Bachus himself has said that Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.”

By Igor Volsky and Pat Garofalo

Yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) presented his budget as a bold vision for the future that would rescue the nation “from brink of national bankruptcy and place the country on a more sustainable course. “It is not just a budget – it is a cause,” Ryan said yesterday. “It represents our choice for America’s future, and our commitment to the American people.” Just hours after his remarks, however, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its analysis of Ryan’s budget and concluded that the GOP’s “commitment” to Americans was not nearly as strong as the Chairman suggests.

Below are five ways in which the CBO report undermines Ryan’s lofty rhetoric:

1. SENIORS WOULD PAY MORE FOR HEALTH CARE: In 2022, seniors can purchase private insurance from a new Medicare exchange of private plans that have higher costs than traditional Medicare — both because of higher “administrative costs (including profits) and payment rates to providers” — with a “premium support” credit from the federal government that does not not keep up with health care spending. As the CBO concluded, “Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.” “[T]he beneficiary’s share in 2030 would be 68 percent under the proposal” but only “25 percent” under current law. Starting in 2022, the age of eligibility for Medicare would also “increase by two months per year until it reached 67 in 2033.”

2. ELDERLY AND DISABLED WOULD LOSE MEDICAID COVERAGE: In 2013, the budget would eliminate the exiting matching-grant financing structure of Medicaid and would instead give each state a pre-determined block grant. According to the CBO, “Chairman Ryan’s proposal would shift some of the burden of Medicaid’s growing costs to the states.” “If the costs of medical services for Medicaid enrollees continued to rise faster than the growth in the block grant amounts…states would face significant challenges in achieving sufficient cost savings through efficiencies to mitigate the loss of federal funding.” States would be forced to reduce their spending, lower the size of their Medicaid programs “by cutting payment rates for doctors, hospitals, or nursing homes; reducing the scope of benefits covered; or limiting eligibility.”

3. THIRTY-TWO MILLION AMERICANS WOULD LOSE HEALTH COVERAGE: The budget repeals the requirement to purchase health insurance coverage, the establishment of health insurance exchanges and the provision of subsidies for lower-income Americans, the expansion of the Medicaid program, tax credits for small businesses that provide insurance coverage, along with other provisions. Based on previous CBO estimates, up to 32 million Americans would lose access to insurance. The budget office has not yet “analyzed the changes in health insurance coverage that would occur as a result of the repeal of the specified coverage provisions of the 2010 health care legislation,” however.

4. SHORT TERM DEBT INCREASES RELATIVE TO CURRENT LAW: The budget increases the federal debt as a percentage of GDP in the short-term, because the health care cuts it would implement phase in slowly, while the giant tax cuts for the rich and corporations it includes would take effect immediately. It isn’t until the steep health care cuts take effect that the budget starts to reduce the debt. Ryan’s plan would increase debt held by the public to 70 percent of GDP in 2022, while current law would increase it to 67 percent.

5. NO CONFIRMATION ON TAX REVENUES: The only reason that CBO scored Ryan’s plan as reducing the debt in the coming decades is because Ryan’s staff instructed CBO to assume that the plan would raise 19 percent of GDP in revenue. However, CBO noted that “there were no specifications of particular revenue provisions that would generate that path.” Ryan’s previous budget plan — the Roadmap for America’s Future — included wildly optimistic revenue assumptions that dramatically changed the effect the plan would have on the federal debt.

During a speech at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that his budget — which was released yesterday — “reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt.” But does it?

According to the official score from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the House Republican budget does significantly reduce the national debt, eventually (though it increases the debt in the short-term, because the health care cuts it would implement phase in slowly, while the giant tax cuts for the rich it includes would take effect immediately). But the CBO only shows this result because it is assuming that the government will raise 19 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in revenue.

Why is the CBO assuming that? Because Ryan’s staff told it to, without indicating how that revenue would actually be raised:

The path for revenues as a percentage of GDP was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The path rises steadily from about 15 percent of GDP in 2010 to 19 percent in 2028 and remains at that level thereafter. There were no specifications of particular revenue provisions that would generate that path.

If you tell the CBO to assume a certain amount of revenue will be raised, it does, even if that revenue is wildly optimistic. Ryan did the same thing when he had the CBO score his Roadmap For America’s Future. He told the CBO to assume that the plan would raise 19 percent of GDP in revenue, and the CBO based the rest of its numbers on that assumption. But when the Tax Policy Center ran the numbers, it found the Roadmap would raise far less than Ryan said it would:

Assuming taxpayers choose their preferred tax system, revenue would average 16.1 percent of GDP between fiscal years 2011 and 2015, rising to 16.6 percent by 2020, compared with 20.2 percent under CBO’s January 2010 baseline. The fall in revenue would result primarily from the lower individual income tax rates and the exemption of capital income.

Without the level of revenue specified, Ryan’s Roadmap wouldn’t set the country on a path to reducing the debt, with debt growing to 175 percent of GDP. Are the revenue assumptions for Ryan’s 2012 budget any better? If they’re not — and we have no reason to believe they are, given Ryan’s previous performance — the radical cuts that Ryan has in mind will fail to reduce the country’s debt.