At the moment, the SEC has two commissioners, both Republican. These are the Trump sycophant Paul Atkins, who serves as the SEC chairman, and the reliably pro-business Mark Uyeda, whom Trump appointed acting chairman before Atkins took office in April 2025. During Trump’s first term, Jim Chanos, a billionaire investment manager who predicted a year in advance the collapse of Enron, pronounced that America had entered “the golden age of fraud.” That was premature. In his second term, Trump is much more energetically pardoning financial fraudsters, and his SEC is more aggressively reducing transparency and slashing enforcement.
To help you understand how appalling this SEC rule change is, bear with me while I explain how the regulatory process works. You have Cabinet agencies like the Commerce Department or the Interior Department and you have independent agencies like the SEC, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. Cabinet agencies are always headed by a single political appointee who answers to the president. Independent agencies are usually headed by a commission, or board, typically consisting of five Senate-confirmed commissioners (or board members). These commissioners serve staggered fixed terms, typically five years. When a sitting commissioner’s term ends, the president nominates a new one, but in doing so he must limit to a bare majority (typically three) the slots filled from his own party. For the remaining slots, he must nominate a person from the opposing party.
Trump, of course, famously lacks impulse control, and he doesn’t like waiting even a little bit to win a majority at any given independent agency. Consequently, he’s experimented with not nominating anybody to an independent agency if the next in line’s a Democrat, or, alternatively, firing sitting Democrats. Sometimes he’s done both. Firing a sitting commissioner without cause was, until this past June, illegal under the Supreme Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision, which said President Franklin Roosevelt lacked the power to fire, without cause, a seriously obnoxious Republican commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission named William E. Humphrey, before Humphrey’s term ended. Humphrey obligingly dropped dead while his case made its way through the courts, but Humphrey’s heirs continued it on the grounds that he was owed back pay, which the final decision granted them. (Hence “Executor.”)
The CFTC, which has neither a statutory quorum requirement nor an internal rule defining a quorum, represents Trump’s beau idéal. It’s operated for nearly one year with a single commissioner, Michael Selig, an enthusiastic cheerleader for crypto, prediction markets, and sports betting. “The era of political lawfare, debanking and regulation by enforcement is over,” Trump’s solitary cop on the commodities beat said in August. “Innovators … are welcomed to the White House, not railroaded to the big house.” In the CFTC we see unitary executiveship at its most uninhibited. Even before Selig got there, CFTC enforcement actions in 2025 were down 80 percent compared to the previous decade, according to NPR’s Luke Garrett.
Because we say so.
Trump v. Slaughter freed Trump to stop independent agencies in their tracks. But depriving them of a quorum turns out to be too clever by half, as I pointed out a month after Trump returned to office. That’s because Trump needs these agencies able to function so they can overturn regulations and rulings left behind by President Joe Biden.
For Trump, the lesson should be: Play it straight! Nominate commissioners in timely fashion and you won’t have to wait long to get your working majority. Rush the process by firing commissioners, or by not nominating new ones, and you may deprive yourself of the quorum necessary to overturn Democratic precedents and do the business lobby’s bidding.
Even before the rule change, the SEC’s quorum requirement was, at least formally, fairly lax. Under a 1995 rule, three votes constituted a quorum if that agency had three or more commissioners. If it had two commissioners, or even one, then two or one could constitute a quorum on a sort of emergency basis. However, if the number of voting commissioners in a particular case was reduced by one or more recusals, then a minimum of two votes was still necessary to establish a quorum. This seemingly minor exception had the practical effect of imposing in nearly all instances a three-person quorum.
John Reed Start, who was an SEC lawyer at the time the 1995 rule was implemented, wrote on LinkedIn that its provisional allowance for a quorum of two or one commissioners “was a stopgap, nothing more, and everyone assumed five commissioners would eventually be in place.” Indeed, according to Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times, with one exception (a six-month period in 2008) the SEC has never in its 92-year history operated without a member of the minority party.
SEC Commissioner Uyeda’s term lasts through much of 2028, and if nobody is nominated to succeed him it can be extended through the rest of Trump’s presidency (and perhaps several months into the next). But if Uyeda’s term isn’t extended—or if Uyeda must recuse himself from this or that case—SEC Chair Atkins can act as Trump’s one-man quorum for the remainder of Trump’s presidency, because Atkins’ term doesn’t end until 2030. Granted, under Trump v. Slaughter any Democrat who succeeds Trump can (and probably will) fire Atkins promptly on January 20, 2029. But if a Republican succeeds Trump, Atkins could end up running the SEC as a one-man band for years.
When the president commands a majority at an independent agency, that agency makes decisions in at least rough accordance with the president’s views. Why, then, should we care whether members of the opposite party are present to register dissent? Because, Senate Banking Committee Democrats wrote the White House in June, “a full slate of commissioners and board members can bring a range of perspectives to policies that shape our markets.”
In a September 30 letter to the SEC, a shareholder activist named James McRitchie quoted several past and present SEC commissioners about the virtue of the SEC’s bipartisan structure. One of them, ironically, was Uyeda, who I presume must have voted in favor of the SEC’s new rule change (otherwise it would have deadlocked 1-1). Here’s what Uyeda said:
Amen. But what changed Uyeda’s mind after he spoke these words? The presence of a Republican in the White House. Uyeda delivered the above remarks in 2022, when Joe Biden was president and Uyeda was a lowly minority-party SEC commissioner. Now that Uyeda’s aligned with the White House and the SEC has gone almost a year without any minority-party commissioners, I suppose he’s come to appreciate the peace and quiet. But Uyeda will rediscover the virtues of “different perspectives” when Democrats retake the White House. When that happens, Democrats should honor independent-agency norms, restore space for the opposition, and above all abolish the one-person quorum.
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