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”, claiming the Dem commander-in-chief and 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 68-year-old lawyer said.
“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.
His comments come as the final Democrat SEC commissioner, Caroline Crenshaw, prepares to leave office when her term in up next month.
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.
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 earlier.
“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 would support combining the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a smaller regulator that focuses and derivatives, as lawmakers grapple with how to oversee the burgeoning US crypto market.
But he said he has supported the idea “for years” and that it “makes a lot of sense — especially with the potentially overlapping jurisdictions” between the two.
