Enforcement cases brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fell more than 20% in the latest fiscal year as the regulator “recentered” its enforcement program, the agency said April 7.
The SEC brought 456 enforcement actions in the fiscal year that ran through the end of September, the agency said in a long-awaited annual enforcement report. The regulator brought nearly half of those actions before the start of the Trump administration in January 2025, SEC data showed.
Total monetary penalties surged to a whopping $17.9 billion, largely due to a final judgment in a Ponzi scheme case the SEC originally brought in 2009. Excluding that case, the SEC levied penalties and disgorgement of $2.7 billion.
That compares to $8.2 billion in financial remedies and 583 actions a year earlier.
“We have redirected resources toward the types of misconduct that inflict the greatest harm – particularly fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust – and away from approaches that prioritized volume and record-setting penalties over true investor protection,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in a statement.
To be sure, enforcement activity typically slows during transition years as new leaders come into the building, according to experts and past data. But 2025’s dramatic decline points to a deeper change in how the SEC views enforcement activity under Republican leadership.
In an unusual statement underscoring that change, the SEC noted that its annual statistics did not include 1,095 matters in which potential violations were investigated and later closed or practices were remediated.
Enforcement resources were “misapplied” in the past to “run up numbers, and in turn, led to misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement,” the SEC said.
Atkins has long criticized large corporate penalties for harming shareholders. He has said he wants to refocus enforcement on bread-and-butter SEC cases involving fraud and investor harm.
Under Republican leaders, the SEC has moved away from large corporate cases with steep penalties and has also dismissed numerous high-profile cases against crypto firms and executives.
The SEC’s enforcement division has been reeling from the sudden resignation of its enforcement director last month and a mass exodus of staff under the Trump administration. The division lost 18% of its staff in fiscal 2025, a recent government report showed.
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