# SEC The **Securities and Exchange Commission**, created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, is the independent regulator of securities markets and corporate disclosure. It registers securities offerings, polices fraud and insider trading, oversees exchanges, brokers, and investment advisers, and enforces the public-company reporting regime. Five commissioners, five-year staggered terms, no more than three from one party. Its founding logic is worth stating plainly because it is the thing currently being unwound: the SEC exists on the premise that **markets do not police themselves**, that the information asymmetry between issuers and investors is structural rather than incidental, and that mandatory disclosure backed by enforcement is what makes public capital markets trustworthy enough to use. It is a [[New Deal]] institution, and the arguments against it are the arguments against the New Deal. ## Why the SEC matters to this vault Three threads run through it. **Deregulation as a project.** Chairman [[Paul Atkins]], a deregulation-minded former commissioner appointed in 2025, has reoriented the agency toward lighter-touch enforcement. The climate-disclosure rule and the prior commission's broader enforcement agenda were rolled back. The measurable question — and a good one for the vault to track over time rather than assert — is enforcement volume and penalty totals year over year, which are published. **Crypto.** This is the largest substantive shift. The agency moved from an enforcement-first posture toward the digital-asset industry to a permissive rulemaking one: dropping or settling major cases, and building registration and tokenization frameworks rather than litigating whether tokens are securities. Atkins has set out a 2026 agenda centred on crypto market structure and tokenization. The conflict-of-interest question sits on top of it — the President's family holds substantial crypto ventures, which means the regulated industry and the regulator's ultimate superior share a financial interest. That is a live [[Regulatory Capture]] question and belongs on the specific deal and company pages where it can be sourced. **Independence.** The SEC is one of the commissions covered by [[Trump v. Slaughter]] (June 29, 2026), which ended for-cause removal protection for independent-agency commissioners. The commission's statutory party-balance requirement is now unenforceable. A securities regulator that serves at the President's pleasure is a materially different institution from one that does not, particularly where enforcement targets may be politically connected — and the change happened without Congress amending a word of the 1934 Act. ## See Also - [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] - [[Paul Atkins]] - [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] - [[Regulatory Capture]] · [[Financial System Hub]] · [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] - [[Federal Agencies]]