SEC Chairman Paul Atkins ripped Joe Biden on Tuesday, accusing the former president’s administration of weaponizing financial rules to push his woke agenda as Wall Street’s new top cop vowed to “make IPOs great again”.
The new head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission made a thinly veiled dig at disclosure red tape, such as environmental and social governance rules, that he lambasted as “regulatory creep.”
The veteran corporate lawyer also lashed out at the Dem commander-in-chief, insisting his allies “weaponized” financial disclosure rules “to advance social and political agendas.”
“The path to public ownership has become narrower, costlier, and overly burdened with rules that often create more friction than benefit,” the 67-year-old attorney said.
Trump’s SEC chair Paul Atkins was speaking at the New York Stock Exchange with a vow to Make IPOs Great Again. James Franey/NY Post
“These trends have eroded American competitiveness; locked average investors out of some of the most dynamic companies; and pushed entrepreneurs to seek capital elsewhere, either in the private markets or on foreign shores,” he added.
“These decades of accretive rulemakings have produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate,” Atkins, who took up the role in April, said, criticizing lengthy annual reports and proxy statements that burden companies with high costs while overwhelming investors.
Atkins also warned that the burden of complying with the SEC rulebook, which he inherited from his interventionist predecessor, Gary Gensler, was a barrier to raising capital for smaller companies.
“The last comprehensive reform to these thresholds took place in 2005. This dereliction of regulatory upkeep has resulted in a company with a public float of as low as $250 million being subject to the same disclosure requirements as a company that is one hundred times its size,” he said.
Atkins’ comments came as the final Democrat commissioner on the SEC, Caroline Crenshaw, prepares to leave office when her term ends next month.
Atkins rang the Opening Bell on Wall Street on Tuesday before his speech, calling for a return to the basics of American capitalism. James Franey/NY Post
It leaves just GOP commissioners Atkins, Hester M. Peirce, and one-time acting chair Mark T. Uyeda are the only top SEC officials left in office as the current administration looks to take a more light-touch approach to regulating financial markets.
Atkins, who previously served at the SEC in the 1990s and returned as chairman earlier this year, tied the critique to a broader historical narrative as America approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026.
He issued a full-throated defense of America’s capitalist past and a return to founding father Alexander Hamilton’s vision of economic freedom.
“Hamilton understood that markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could,” Atkins told an audience of officials and bankers.
The SEC is Wall Street’s top financial watchdog. Atkins was speaking at an event to mark this nation’s 250th anniversary earlier today in New York. James Franey/NY Post
“Our prosperity is no accident of history—nor is our primacy assured in the future,” he added. “In recent years, our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States
to once stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies.”
The crypto-friendly Trump appointee pointed to a 40% drop in US-listed companies since the mid-1990s, from over 7,000 to about 4,200, blaming rules that multiplied faster than the problems they aimed to solve.
Atkins, in an interview with Fox Business in July, hinted that he could support combining the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a smaller regulator that focuses on derivatives, as lawmakers grapple with how to oversee the burgeoning US crypto market.
He said that he had supported it “for years” and that it “makes a lot of sense — especially with the potentially overlapping jurisdictions” between the two as America looks to become the world’s major player in cryptocurrency.
It follows years of stifling regulations under the Biden administration, where investors complained of a “turf war” between the two bodies.
The SEC regulates the securities markets, including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, while the CFTC regulates the derivatives markets, such as futures, options, and swaps. In Britain, for example, both jobs are handed to one sole watchdog: the Financial Conduct Authority.
Speaking exclusively to The Post after his speech on Wall Street, Atkins downplayed the chances of an SEC-CFTC merger coming to fruition during President Trump’s second term in office.
“Congress will have to do it, and I don’t see that happening,” Atkins said. “But we can do so much in the meantime. We can harmonize things (with the CFTC)…we will be able to collaborate and work together.
“There should be no daylight between the two agencies, and that’s our goal,” he added. “The field is littered after a battle with bodies of would-be new products that got killed in the crossfire.”