WASHINGTON - Just before the financial crisis hit, Wells Fargo & Co. had $609 billion in assets. Now it has $1.4 trillion. Bank of America Corp. had $1.7 trillion in assets. That's up to $2.1 trillion. And the assets of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation's biggest bank, have ballooned to $2.4 trillion from $1.8 trillion. Ending the problem of so-called too-big-to-fail firms was a rallying cry for politicians and regulators after the unprecedented bailouts in fall 2008. The issue was the major impetus for enacting the sweeping Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul two years later. President Obama and key financial regulators said the law's reforms, many still not finished, will prevent another financial industry rescue by reducing the chances that a mega-bank would collapse and by giving the government new powers to handle one if it did. Yet five years after the crisis, several of the nation's largest banks are even larger. Total assets at the nation's 10 biggest banking companies shot up 28% to $11.3 trillion, as of the end of June, federal regulators said. There is rare agreement among many Democrats and Republicans in Washington that those banks still are too big to fail, leaving the nation's economy even more at risk. "These banks are too big to manage and they're too big to regulate," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Too-big-to-fail hasn't been fixed. Agreement on identifying the problem, however, doesn't mean both sides of the aisle can agree on a solution. Arguments still rage in Washington on an issue that now is known simply as TBTF. Like many Democrats, Brown believes that the new rules, including federal authority to seize and dismantle firms if their failure threatened to trigger a crisis, don't go far enough. They want new laws that could force mega-banks to downsize. If they're not too big, the argument goes, then they're not too big to fail. Most Republicans agree that the problem of too-big-to-fail institutions has become worse. But they don't blame the banks and don't want to force them to shrink. The culprit is the financial reform law itself, one of Obama's signature first-term accomplishments. "Rather than ending too-big-to-fail, Dodd-Frank codified it and wrote it into law," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). The government's new power to seize large financial firms teetering near collapse could result in them being rescued instead of shut down, in effect enshrining bailouts as an option for federal officials, McHenry said. Wall Street executives and investors know the public safety net is still there, and that has fueled the growth of those banks since the crisis, McHenry said. The solution, he and many House Republicans said, is to get rid of that authority and make clear that any financial firm - no matter its size - would be forced into bankruptcy if in danger of failing. If all banks can fail, then none would be too big to fail, Republicans said. "The public yearns for an easy solution and a villain," said Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. People don't like the big banks, so break them up. The solutions aren't so simple, Elliott and other experts said. The Dodd-Frank law tried to deal with the threat of a mega-bank meltdown by limiting the risks financial firms could take to reduce the chances they would get into trouble.