President Obama reportedly plans to nominate Mary Jo White to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, replacing outgoing chair Mary Schapiro. White is Obama’s first female appointment of his second term, a break from a heavily white male bench early picks. (White may be used to that — she was also the first female US attorney in Manhattan.)

But there’s more to know about what White will bring to the job, which requires her to set the standards for Wall Street regulation — a particularly important task, as large parts of Dodd-Frank, the financial reform legislation passed during Obama’s first term, are still being implemented. Here’s a look a White’s resume:

She defends banks accused of white collar crime. White currently serves as an attorney at law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, where she defends “companies and individuals accused by the government of involvement in white collar corporate crime or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and civil securities law violations.” The client list at the firm includes some of the most predatory banks in the country — JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank Of America, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, UBS. White “represented Ken Lewis, the former chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp., during an SEC probe of claims the bank didn’t disclose bonuses that Merrill Lynch & Co. paid to executives before buying the brokerage.”

But she has prosecuted those same banks. Before Debevoise & Plimpton, White was on the other side, pushing for convictions in white collar cases. White has a particular area of “expertise in pursuing… complex securities and financial fraud cases.” That work, in particular, will prove important at the SEC, since Dodd-Frank will require the SEC to prosecute such crimes to a new degree.

She has a lineup of fascinating non-white collar cases. Among the things White prosecuted during her time working as an Attorney for the state of New York are: Two bombing cases (including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), drug trafficking, and the prosecution of mob boss John Gotti. On the other side, White also defended directors at News Corp. during the phone hacking scandal there.

She would be the first prosecutor to head the SEC. The AP reports, “White would be the first prosecutor to head the 79-year-old SEC. Most SEC chairmen traditionally have come from Wall Street or the ranks of private securities lawyers.” This is a good thing, compared to potential other picks who might have even closer ties to Wall Street, and be less inclined to vigorously prosecute risky trading practices that run rampant on Wall Street, and have been the cause for past financial instability.

It is not yet clear what the nomination process will look like for White, but it’s likely that her position strikes a balance between corporate and public that will be palatable to politicians across the board. The bigger question is what White will do when she assumes the office. With Dodd-Frank still unfinished, there’s a lot of work on the table for White, newly-appointed Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew, and the rest of their colleagues.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Schapiro will, as expected, be stepping down in January. President Obama already announced that SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter will take her place.

Schapiro’s departure means that the five-member SEC Commission is down to four members: two Democrats and two Republicans. And as Fortune’s Cyrus Sanati noted, that’s bad news for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

With the Commission now balanced, it will be virtually impossible for Walter to push through the administration’s agenda, most notably, the implementation of all the rules still left to be sorted out that are part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill. Turning the massive bill into rules has been a tough slog for the Commission as they have faced strong opposition from Wall Street. The most controversial aspects of the overhaul, like the Volcker Rule, which would limit a bank’s ability to trade and invest its own capital, to the so-called title seven reforms, which overhaul the multi-trillion dollar derivatives market, remain locked in regulatory limbo.

That’s great news for Wall Street as it delays implementation of some of the more profit-killing parts of Dodd-Frank — a delay that many on the Street wish will become the new status quo. The large broker dealers that stand to lose billions of dollars once derivative reform takes place will undoubtedly try to ensure that the two conservatives on the Commission block any attempts to push through title seven. The same goes with the Volcker Rule.

These rules are key to ensuring that the financial system is more stable and secure, as big banks will not be able to take risks that threaten the entire economy. (And there will be a mechanism in place to take those banks apart should they blow themselves up.) Wall Street has been lobbying to slow down those rules — in an effort to kill them off entirely — and having a gridlocked SEC will only help the banks achieve their goal.

On NBC’s Meet the Press this morning, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward dismissed SEC disclosure documents — the only transparency for corporations in our largely unregulated financial sector — as essentially meaningless forms that obscure what is really happening.

Woodward told host David Gregory that SEC documents that suggest Mitt Romney has been less than honest about his tenure at Bain Capital should be ignored:

WOODWARD: People who are relying on SEC documents know the value of SEC documents. I mean, they are camouflages for what’s really going. So that’s not really the issue.

Watch the video:

The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission’s mission is “to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Part of that involves “promoting the disclosure of important market-related information” so citizens, journalists, and investors can have accurate information about who is doing what and make educated decisions.

In 2002, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), now the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, identified the SEC as being primarily responsible for both “defending capitalism but also vigilant in rooting out the excesses and rooting out wrongdoing.”

Two of the nation’s top financial regulatory agencies don’t have enough funding to competently regulate the Wall Street banks they oversee, top regulatory officials told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) both took on new regulatory responsibilities under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, but multiple rounds of Republican-led budget cuts aimed at neutering the new law have left them without sufficient funding to carry out those mandates.

As a result, the agencies are “outgunned” by the Wall Street banks they oversee, SEC head Mary Schapiro and CFTC head Gary Gensler told the committee Tuesday, the Huffington Post reports:

“We’re way underfunded at the CFTC,” Gensler told lawmakers, after a question on the subject from Senator Chuck Schumer (D- N.Y.). “Imagine if, all of a sudden, there are eight times the number of teams on the [football] field, but only seven refs,” Gensler said. “There would be would be mayhem on the field. The fans would lose confidence.”

SEC chief Schapiro echoed the point: “We’ve been asked to take on very significant new responsibilities,” she said. Though the SEC has made progress in hiring new staffers and improving its technological capabilities, Schapiro conceded that, in some areas, the efforts haven’t gone far enough.

As ThinkProgress noted in January, adequately funding the CFTC and SEC is imperative to successfully implementing new regulations and policing Wall Street. Republicans oppose those efforts and have repeatedly pushed for cuts to the agencies’ budgets. “The less we fund those agencies,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last June, “the better America will be.”

The SEC is funded by fees paid by banks, not by taxpayers, so cuts to its budget won’t affect the federal deficit. But it is prohibited from collecting more in fees than it is allocated in the budget, so the $225 million cut Republicans pushed last year amounts to a massive giveaway to Wall Street, which will save exactly that amount.

As the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, failure to police Wall Street can have perilous consequences for American taxpayers and the economy. But when one party’s purpose, as Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) said last year, is to “serve the banks,” preventing another such fiasco is apparently of little matter.

One of the many ways in which House Republicans have sought to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — and the tactic that has been most successful — is denying the regulatory agencies that police financial markets enough funding to adequately do their job. The GOP, in particular, has denied funding to the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite that agency’s vast new responsibilities under Dodd-Frank.

This week, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro implored Congress to give her agency the funding it needs. In the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) offered an amendment to do just that, but House Republicans voted it down on party lines.

But the worst part about the GOP’s intransigence when it comes to funding the SEC is that the agency isn’t even paid for by taxpayers. Instead, its budget comes from fees assessed on Wall Street. So refusing to fund it undermines regulatory enforcement, and just leaves more money to the banks:

Cutting the S.E.C.’s budget will have no effect on the budget deficit, won’t save taxpayers a dime and could cost the Treasury millions in lost fees and penalties. That’s because the S.E.C. isn’t financed by tax revenue, but rather by fees levied on those it regulates, which include all the big securities firms.

A little-noticed provision in Dodd-Frank mandates that those fees can’t exceed the S.E.C.’s budget. So cutting its requested budget by $222.5 million saves Wall Street the same amount.

The SEC regulates more than 35,000 institutions, and to give a sense of the funding gap it faces, JP Morgan Chase spends four times the SEC’s entire budget on information technology alone.

As the New York Times’ James Stewart put it, “given the magnitude of the S.E.C.’s task, Congress could make Wall Street firms pay more and not less to police the mess they helped create.” However, House Republicans have refused to do that, instead following House Financial Services Committee Chairman’s Spencer Bachus’ (R-AL) philosophy that Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.”