When President Donald Trump asked me to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, my mandate was clear: restore clarity, integrity, and trust to an agency that had lost sight of its core mission. One year later, we are delivering on that mission, and the most important work still lies ahead.
I inherited an agency that had drifted — deliberately and consequentially — from Congress‘s original intent. The division charged with preventing fraud and protecting investors had reoriented itself around generating media headlines rather than generating safer markets. Regulators sacrificed clear guidance for unchecked discretion, and political ambition replaced investor protection and capital formation.
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This deviation, while unfortunate, is not irreversible. Nor is it beyond our reach. With a committed staff and strong conviction, our course correction is well underway.
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We have ended the Biden administration‘s “regulation by enforcement” approach, which discouraged innovators from building in America. We no longer wield the SEC’s enforcement program as a policy instrument from the shadows. We have redirected resources toward the types of misconduct that inflict the greatest harm: fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust. And we have placed renewed emphasis on holding wrongdoers accountable. The days of measuring success by case counts and record-setting penalties are over. Our standard now is the depth of impact, not the volume of output.
But returning the commission to its core mandate required more than correcting past excesses. It also demanded clarity where uncertainty had undermined growth.
For too long, Washington viewed emerging on-chain financial infrastructure as something to be restrained through regulatory ambiguity and overzealous enforcement, rather than evaluated on its merits as a tool for modernization. Good-faith compliance efforts should not be met with the prospect of a subpoena. Yet for years, that was the calculus facing anyone attempting to build in the American digital asset space: unclear rules, unpredictable enforcement, and no safe path forward. Innovators made the rational choice to leave.
Today, that is changing. We are advancing our approach to meet the needs of the modern market and investors. To start, the SEC issued an interpretation that distinguishes what is — and is not — a security subject to our oversight. We are providing regulatory clarity through the SEC’s joint initiative with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Project Crypto, to harmonize our rulebooks, eliminate duplicative requirements, and establish clear and durable regulatory boundaries. These steps are re-shoring the innovation that migrated overseas and delivering on what the Trump administration set out to accomplish on day one: cementing America’s position as the crypto capital of the world. Still, Congress must pass the CLARITY Act to enshrine these necessary reforms in law.
Our public markets require the same attention. In the past three decades, the number of publicly listed companies dropped by roughly 40%. That decline is more than a data point. It is lost opportunity: fewer choices for investors, fewer paths to growth for entrepreneurs, and fewer public companies participating in the deepest and most liquid markets in the world.
Over the last year, we have laid the groundwork to reverse this trend by removing some of the impediments to companies going and staying public. We have adopted policies that empower companies to fight against frivolous litigation. We have also reaffirmed that the SEC is a disclosure regulator, not a merit regulator, and that corporate governance matters belong to the states. As a disclosure regulator, we will seek to lessen the costly burden of complex immaterial reporting requirements.
Now, we are expanding upon this foundation with a focused agenda to Make IPOs Great Again and restore America’s markets as the world’s most attractive engine for innovation. Central to this program is a transformation of our disclosure regime to eliminate excessive requirements that do not benefit market integrity, capital formation, or investor protection. At Trump’s direction, we are preparing a proposal to allow companies to opt for semiannual reporting, with the goal of removing the agency’s thumb from the scale and allowing the market to dictate the optimal reporting frequency based on a company’s industry, size, and investor expectations.
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I have also directed SEC staff to pursue three targeted reforms: giving newly public companies an extended runway before they need to comply with the same requirements applicable to large, seasoned issuers; expanding regulatory breathing room — currently reserved for smaller firms — to a broader set of companies; and streamlining access to capital so that public companies can seize market opportunities more quickly.
We are making historic progress, but our work is far from finished. By rejecting the institutional drift that the previous administration had normalized, we have begun recalibrating the agency with its statutory mandate. Our ambitious rulemaking agenda in the year ahead will build on that foundation at a promising moment. America’s capital markets must continue to mirror the character of our nation — dynamic, deep, and unrivaled in their ability to convert innovation into opportunity. That has long been their promise. And in this new day at the SEC, it is a promise that they will continue to keep.
Paul S. Atkins is the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
