Apparently, the reality of setting 387 rules is trumping the politics of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The federal government today acknowledged that Dodd-Frank will not keep to Congress’s timetables.

“The reality is, we’re not going to complete all the work in the timetable Congress set,” Scott O’Malia, a commissioner at the CFTC, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal today. But the need to “get the rules right” is more important than rigidly meeting Congress’s “unrealistic” deadlines, he said.  

In addition to the 30 rule-making procedures that already have missed the deadline set by Congress, 145 are supposed to be completed by year end. A big chunk of the looming deadlines falls close to July 21, the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama signing the bill into law.

Officials at the SEC, on the hook for more Dodd-Frank-related regulations than any other U.S. agency, have finished six rules, proposed 28 additional rules, missed deadlines on 11—and still have 50 to go, on which they have yet to issue any proposals. The agency’s rule-making responsibilities range from new controls on credit ratings to powers to claw back executive pay.

John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said the agency is “working hard to meet the deadlines, with an emphasis on getting the rules right.”

We’ve regulators at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere essentially with their peddle to the metal trying to meet Dodd-Frank deadlines — and missing. This is going to be a long process, to say the least, and regulators are already back-channeling to Congress to ease the deadlines. Today’s article is part of that.