To police the major banks, President Obama keeps spinning the same revolving door to bring in more Wall Street types, according to former Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., former chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program and a staunch critic of the blurring roles between government and the financial services industry.

The outcome of such a conflicted process is easy to predict, Kaufman wrote in a column for Forbes.

He noted a long list of initial Obama administration officials who all came to the nation's capital by way of way of Wall Street, from then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Schapiro to Attorney General Eric Holder and Gary Gensler, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Forbes Columnist: ‘Who the Hell Cleared This?’

"Not so surprisingly, once they got in office most sided with the big banks whenever financial reforms were discussed. Many of the regulators, in fact, had worked in jobs before their appointments that would be affected by any new rules they made," Kaufman alleged.

Nothing much has changed in Obama's second term, he stressed, noting that new SEC Chair Mary Jo White "and her top appointees at the SEC will frequently have to recuse themselves due to their many years in private practice representing the Wall Street firms they now are expected to police."

In Washington-speak, observers inside the D.C. Beltway sometimes allude to "regulatory capture," by which they refer to regulators being co-opted by and acting in favor of the very industries they are charged with regulating.

According to Kaufman, regulatory capture is all too evident in Washington in 2013. He said he had hoped "too big to fail" banks would be curbed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be fixed and credit agencies would be straightened out by now.

"The first major appointments of the second term make it clear that none of those things is likely to happen," Kaufman predicted.

In addition to White and her top SEC deputies, he cited new Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, freshly landed from Citigroup where he had a guaranteed bonus if he took a high government position.

"So while the cast has changed, the second act of the Obama administration may look much like the first when it comes to financial reform," Kaufman stated.

Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management agreed the Wall Street reform process has gone poorly.

"At present, reform is on a trajectory to do too little, too late with regard to addressing the next crisis," Johnson wrote in his Bloomberg column. "As we approach the fifth anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., what exactly are we waiting for?"

Forbes Columnist: ‘Who the Hell Cleared This?’