United States Representative Maxine Waters officially sent a letter to the House Financial Services Committee Chair, French Hill, on Sunday, pressing for a hearing with Paul Atkins, the SEC Chairman. The United States democrat wants to investigate the crypto approach of the SEC and the chairman’s decision to pause around 60% of crypto enforcement cases under Donald Trump’s administration. In addition, she has strongly condemned the newly introduced crypto policy changes.
Water raised concerns regarding the SEC’s direction and urged the House Financial Services Committee to schedule a full Committee oversight hearing. She wrote in the letter that she requested that a full Committee oversight hearing be scheduled with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins, adding that the Committee has a responsibility to oversee the nation’s securities laws and to review how the SEC’s implementation of the law affects investor protection, market efficiency, and competition.
In the letter sent on Sunday, she mentioned several big names, drawing attention to the discontinued legal cases against Binance, Coinbase, and Justin Sun. She wrote,
“The SEC has terminated or stayed major enforcement actions against multiple crypto companies and individuals that had been credibly accused of major violations of our securities laws, including Coinbase, Binance, and Justin Sun.”
During Gary Gensler’s oversight, the SEC managed to register an average of dozens of cases per year, but when it comes to Paul Atkin’s leadership under the Trump administration, the regulating agency has not registered a single crypto enforcement filing since 2025. This clearly supports Maxine Waters’s claim and questions the direction of the SEC. She claimed that the SEC under Chairman Atkins had generally adopted an approach to policymaking that eschewed notice-and-comment rulemaking in favor of staff statements and extending the compliance dates of Commission rules. She noted that this approach flouted the SEC’s legal obligations under the Administrative Procedure Act and excluded the vital role public comment provided in identifying issues.
She also pointed out that some of the cases filed by the SEC were closed even before final votes. According to her, politics has a lot to do with these dismissals, and the chairman’s office played a pivotal role in the negotiations that led to the case drops. She also alleged that the House Financial Services Committee has neither scrutinized the SEC’s rationale for dismissing these cases nor intends to deter fraud and manipulation in markets, affecting a large number of retail investors.
SEC Lost 15%–19% of Staff Under Paul Atkins, Says Maxine Waters
Maxine Waters has raised numerous questions and operational concerns in her letter to French Hill, with staffing-related issues standing out prominently. According to her, during the Paul Atkins era, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lost 15% to 19% of its full-time headcount over the course of several weeks. The significant workforce drawdown indicates the operational shift, and she fears that the change could negatively impact the transparency of the regulating agency.
After raising the concerns, she urged the House Financial Services Committee to assess the operational impact of the recent mass exodus of senior career staff from the SEC, including in the Divisions of Enforcement, Trading and Markets, and Corporation Finance, and to consider whether the agency had the human capital necessary to accomplish its mission and do the job Congress required it to do.
She also questioned the ethics and conflict of interest of both the SEC and Paul Atkins. Waters urged the committee to take deregulatory actions based on Paul Atkins’s recent roles in the private sector, and she alleged that his influence could impact the decision-making process of the regulating agency. She wrote in the letter that, given the Chairman’s recent private sector roles, the Committee had to ensure that deregulatory actions taken under the Chairman’s direction were based on data, not previous client preferences or the preferences of persons affiliated with President Trump. She emphasized the need to review the agency’s recusal and ethics compliance regarding those specific rule withdrawals.
She concluded the letter and urged convening a hearing with Chairman Atkins as soon as practicable when Congress returned, given the breadth of those developments. She stated that the Committee’s oversight obligation was not optional and that investors, retirees, and working families deserved transparency and accountability.
