In politics, language is everything. The politicians know that if you frame an issue properly, you are halfway to winning the battle. That’s why we often end up with names for laws that are terribly misleading or otherwise infused with partisan language.

There are many examples of this in the storied and often checkered past of American politics. Ronald Reagan had a delft touch in this; he came up with The Peacekeeper Missile. Two decades later, the Republican Party continued the practice of ‘winning by framing’ when the anti-choice wing introduced a bill banning certain types of abortions by calling the legislation “The Partial Birth Abortion Ban.”

Today, the trend continues. The Patient Care and Affordable Care Act becomes Obamacare. The Patriot Act was a convenient acronym and, to be fair, much easier to say than its full name, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.

Recently, a piece of legislation called the “Whistleblower Improvement Act of 2011” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. But far from improving whistleblower programs, the legislation would stop them before they get off the ground.

The proposed law would require whistleblowers to report fraud internally first, almost certainly tipping off the wrongdoers and giving them time to destroy evidence. It would also strip protections for whistleblowers whose employers retaliate against them for turning informant.

The bill, introduced by Representative Michael Grimm of New York, is currently being considered by the House Committee on Financial Services. Although it may pass in the House, it is fortunately unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

One of the programs such a law would undermine is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) new whistleblower program, which was finalized last week. The program, nearly identical to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s program, will reward whistleblowers with up to 30 percent of the recovery if they provide information that leads to a successful enforcement action.

This program will help expose fraud in a number of areas and help to prevent another financial disaster like the one we saw in 2008. For one thing, thanks to new mandates from Congress under the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill, the CFTC will have the authority to regulate the swaps market.

The swaps market played an important role in the financial crisis when American International Group (AIG), a massive international insurance company, used swaps to insure the investments of companies that held risky mortgage-backed securities. AIG collected premiums from the holders of this incredibly risky debt, offering to pay its policyholders a specified amount in the event that the loans went bad.

Of course, we know now that these investments included sub-prime loans made by predatory lending institutions that knew, or should have known, that the loans could not be repaid on time. When the loans began to go bad, policyholders put in claims with AIG, which soon found itself bankrupt and in need of a bailout.

If someone at AIG, or any one of the financial institutions it insured, had spoken up earlier to alert the government that they were trading in loans that were almost certain to go bad, the government might not have been forced to bail out the company.

The CFTC also regulates commodity futures markets, in which investors bet on the future price of various goods, such as oil or gold. The potential for fraud in these markets is immense, and a robust whistleblower program will help to deter it.

For instance, when the price of gas began to climb to record levels late this spring, President Obama and the Department of Justice launched an official investigation. The investigation is continuing to look into the role that commodity traders played in raising the price at the pump and whether or not any illegal activities have taken place.

A robust whistleblower program will strengthen this investigation and others like it in the future. It will help deter fraud by raising the risk of an insider turning informant.

Such a tool is even more necessary because the CFTC is chronically underfunded and undermanned. The swaps market alone is worth approximately $600 trillion per year, and that is only one part of the agency’s job. Yet the agency only has a budget of $202 million. Instead of getting a budget increase along with its new responsibilities under Dodd-Frank, a bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would instead cut its budget by 15 percent.

The whistleblower program will help relieve the burden on the CFTC, allowing it to do its job more effectively, but its limited resources will mean that it can only take on the most well-developed and credible cases brought by insiders.

Private attorneys will be needed to develop clear and actionable claims for the CFTC. At Hagens Berman, we have extensive experience in financial fraud cases as well as traditional False Claims Act qui tam cases. We also have a track record of taking on and defeating some of the largest companies in the United States.

In the coming years, we will be representing whistleblowers that expose fraud in the areas the CFTC regulates, including the derivatives and commodities markets.

That fraud will not be brought to light if Congress dismantles the program, and that’s why, even if the name sounds nice, we can not endorse the Whistleblower Improvement Act.