The Chamber

Fighting Regulatory Expansion

In July 2010, President Obama signed a sweeping package of Wall Street reforms into law.  DMA’s Government Affairs team led the way in ensuring that the Restoring American Financial Stability Act provides consumer protections while safeguarding the interests of the direct marketing community in several important ways.

• DMA successfully fought to ensure that a newly-created agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), would not burden marketers with another costly and confusing layer of federal regulation, as the Federal Trade Commission already closely regulates marketing and advertising practices.

• DMANF led a broad coalition to safeguard nonprofits from regulation by the CFPB simply for engaging in their normal charitable giving activities.  Under the original legislation, a charity that explained to a donor how to make a bequest would have been termed a “financial advisor” and been subject to costly fees and regulation by the new agency.

• Leading a coalition of more than 100 member companies and other associations, DMA won a battle to keep provisions that would have significantly expanded the regulatory powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) out of the final bill.  As Linda Woolley, DMA’s executive vice president of government affairs, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, because the FTC has the power to regulate across the entire economy whenever it finds a practice it deems “unfair or deceptive,” there need to be safeguards in place to keep the Commission from deciding on its own to regulate interactive TV, social media advertising, geo-targeting or other new technologies.

Protecting Charitable Deductions

When the Obama Administration proposed reducing the value of charitable deductions to 28 percent from its current 35 percent in order to fund healthcare reform, DMANF led a coalition of over 20 nonprofit organizations in successfully fighting off this latest attack on charitable deductions.

To learn more about DMANF’s continued defense of the charitable deduction – and other important issues facing DMA’s nonprofit members – visit the DMANF website.