The chief executives of three top exchanges were in D.C. Tuesday to meet with Securities and Exchange Commission officials over concerns about increased trading away from public exchanges, FOX Business reports.

With nearly two-thirds of the top executives at the Promontory Financial Group coming from agencies that oversee the financial industry, the firm has become known as “Wall Street’s shadow regulator,” according to The New York Times.

Checks totaling $3.6 billion begin to go out this week as part settlement between regulators and lenders over improper foreclosure proceedings, The Los Angeles Times reports.

A top official from the Bank of England said Tuesday that international financial regulations need to be simplified in order for them to work, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Opinion: Regulators must “co-evolve” with the financial industry if they expect to hold it accountable, Dave Lauer opines in The Huffington Post. 

Read more...

A study found 31 new areas of redundant or wasteful spending by executive branch agency programs.

Sylvia Burwell avoided making any statements about her approach to regulation that could be seen as controversial.

The Health and Human Services (HHS) Department opened the application process Tuesday for $54 million in grants to help people navigate the new insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act.

HHS released the grant opportunity for "navigators" — people who will help consumers shop for insurance in newly created exchanges.

HHS said it expects to spend up to $54 million to fund navigators.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is moving forward with a proposed rule designed to avert a disaster akin to the devastating 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

The Fukushima accident – the worst of its kind since Chernobyl – changed conventional thinking about potential threats facing the United States’ fleet of reactors, and prompted a series of recommendations meant to reduce the dangers.

The top lawyer at the Department of Transportation (DOT) is leaving his post to join one of the nation's largest airlines.

Robert Rivkin, the general counsel at the department for the last four years, will be joining Delta Air Lines as a senior vice president and deputy general counsel for international and regulatory affairs.

A coalition that includes unions and watchdog groups is pressing President Obama’s budget nominee to bring more transparency to the review process for regulations.

The Coalition of Sensible Safeguards says Sylvia Burwell needs to shake things up at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) if she is confirmed as director.

“Given the enormous authority OMB has been given to review any rule a Cabinet agency generates to implement laws, it is critical that the public understand how and why it makes the decisions it makes,” the coalition wrote. “A fresh start is needed at OMB to put measures in place that make OMB at least as transparent as the agencies it oversees.”

The groups want employees to have a say on whether their insurance would cover contraception.

A government watchdog is pressing the IRS to close what it calls a “glaring loophole” that allows tax-exempt groups to play an outsized role in elections.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is asking the IRS in a petition to revise its regulations to say that so-called 501(c)(4) groups must exclusively work on social welfare issues, as CREW says is mandated by tax law.

IRS regulations currently say that groups organized under the 501(c)(4) of the tax code must primarily engage in social welfare work.

Those rules, CREW says, have led groups like the American Action Network and Crossroads GPS to believe that up to 49 percent of their work can be political.

“For decades, this regulation has been a point of contention for the IRS,” Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director and a former Democratic congressional aide, said in a Tuesday statement.

“Being ‘aware’ of the problem is not the same as doing something about it. Political spending by tax-exempt groups is out of hand and it is way past time for the IRS to enforce the law as Congress intended.”