Two former Treasury secretaries joined two former Federal Reserve leaders on Monday to warn that the Trump administration’s efforts to relax oversight of certain financial firms could seriously threaten the stability of America’s financial system.

The stark warning came two months after a federal oversight panel said it planned to stop designating large, non-bank financial institutions like insurers and asset managers as “systemically important” and placing them under stricter federal oversight.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council move would ease a process put in place after the 2008 financial crisis that aimed to prevent non-bank financial firms, like American International Group, from posing a risk to the American economy. Instead of designating companies that the government believes pose a risk to the financial system, they have proposed designated “activities” that pose a risk, such as certain financial products.

Regulators who dealt with the aftermath of the crisis fear that dropping the designation could be a grave mistake. On Monday, the former Treasury secretaries, Jacob J. Lew and Timothy F. Geithner, and the two former Federal leaders, Ben S. Bernanke and Janet L. Yellen, urged their successors, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chairman, to rethink the plan.

“Though framed as procedural changes, these amendments amount to a substantial weakening of the post-crisis reforms,” the four wrote in a letter. “These changes would make it impossible to prevent the buildup of risk in financial institutions whose failure would threaten the stability of the system as a whole.”

Mr. Geithner, Mr. Lew and Ms. Yellen were nominated to their posts by President Barack Obama. Mr. Bernanke was nominated by President George W. Bush.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council proposed abandoning the designation in March and the public comment period on the proposal ends Monday.

In their letter, Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Geithner, Mr. Lew and Ms. Yellen recounted the history of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the federal legislation that created much of the financial system’s post-crisis regulatory architecture. They also explained the logic for applying extra scrutiny to non-bank financial institutions like insurers and money managers.

In the wake of the crisis, just four non-bank financial institutions were designated as “systemic” and all four ultimately argued successfully to have the label lifted. Prudential Financial was the last of the four to shed the designation, with the oversight council concluding last fall that it no longer represented a threat to financial stability.

The oversight council said in March that it would use a new method for determining whether firms posed broad risks to the financial system and that it would only label institutions “systemically important” in extremely rare cases.

The former regulators, who served on the oversight council while in their previous government roles, warned that the process the panel was now proposing would be too slow for reviewing and responding to the conduct of firms.

They also expressed concern that the new system would require that a firm was likely to fail before considering it systematically important, meaning regulators would only be moved to act when firms were already wobbly. The former regulators also raised a concern that communications between the oversight council and firms could create “market-moving” events that would provoke instability rather than keeping it at bay.

“We believe that these steps — in design and in practice — would neuter the designation authority,” the letter said.

President Trump has made deregulation a pillar of his economic agenda based on his belief that it will stimulate growth. The former officials have been careful about criticizing the Trump administration, and Mr. Lew said in an interview that he was relieved that Mr. Trump had not gone as far as he feared he would in rolling back some post-crisis regulations.

But Mr. Lew also said that the proposed weakening of the designation system was a step too far and that he now felt compelled to speak out.

“Taking down the radar and not being able to see and act in time is a big mistake,” Mr. Lew said. “This one rose to the level that, at least from my perspective, it was important not to be silent.”

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