The agency’s regulatory actions this year were down 25%. Experts say a change in leadership is to blame.

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Lilly Riddle

Can we get a little regulation in the house?

The number of enforcement actions taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past fiscal year — addressing everything from fraud to compliance failures — was down by about 25% from 2025, the agency announced this week. Its civil penalties dropped sharply, with the agency levying only $343 million compared to $1.3 billion last year. Leadership changes almost certainly had an effect on the lower figures, as Chairman Paul Atkins, who has been in his position since April of 2025, ushered in a regulatory environment more palatable to crypto, replacing the fine-heavy era under former Chairman Gary Gensler. The numbers will likely spur Congressional hearings following midterm elections that shifted the balance of power in Washington, said Brian Rubin, a partner at Eversheds Sutherland and a former senior enforcement counsel at the SEC.

“The makeup of the commission won’t change, but what we will see is Congressional inquiries about these numbers,” Rubin said. “There will be a focus on, ‘Why aren’t you bringing these types of cases, like crypto cases? Why were certain cases dropped?’” 

SEC the Difference?

Part of the reason behind the drop in enforcement actions is almost certainly the agency’s change in leadership. Chairman Atkins has stated that the agency’s success shouldn’t be determined by its regulatory actions, and the agency even dropped cases against former executives late last year who were pardoned by Trump. “The SEC is focused on protecting corporations rather than prosecuting misconduct, to the detriment of the investors that the SEC supposedly exists to protect,” Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy for Better Markets, said in a statement.

On an individual case level, the decline stems from a shift in focus: Gone are the days of fines against behemoths like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs for their traders’ off-channel communications, Rubin said. “Some of the stats from last year, there were [more] cases against nonadvisors, fake advisors,” he said. A higher proportion of the cases this year, by contrast, dealt with investor protection and fraud, he added.

  • The SEC took 348 enforcement actions over the past fiscal year, a 25% drop from 2025 when it took 456 actions. It marks a 35-year low for enforcement actions, per a Reuters review.
  • In 2024, the agency took 583 actions. This year’s figure marks a 40% drop from 2024.
  • The SEC’s civil penalties this year — $343 million — is an 83% drop from 2024’s figure of $2.1 billion.

Go Regulate Yourselves. Another potential reason for the decline is dwindling funding for, and people working at, the agency. It cut 17% of its staff in June 2025, and in April, it asked for a $1.9 billion budget in 2027, an 11% cut from its budget request for 2026. One step the agency is taking to address this problem is making companies regulate themselves, Rubin said. “What they’re trying to do with the limited resources is for companies to remediate themselves,” he said, “so that the SEC doesn’t have to force them to remediate all the time.”

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