Trump Nominates Paul Atkins to Lead Securities and Exchange Commission

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkins as SEC Chair, signaling a shift toward fewer regulations and crypto-friendly policies.

Paul Atkins, former commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, testifies at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 15, 2011. Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkins to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with the former SEC commissioner and finance veteran expected to take a crypto-friendly stance and push for fewer regulations under the Trump administration.

Trump made the announcement in a Dec. 4 post on Truth Social, in which he singled out Atkins’s past advocacy for lower regulatory burdens and greater financial innovation.

“Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,” Trump wrote. “He believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, & that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World. He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”

Atkins is set to replace the outgoing SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who recently announced his intention to step down on Jan. 20, 2025. Gensler, a staunch critic of the digital assets industry, led the SEC through a robust rulemaking and enforcement agenda.

Trump’s decision to tap Atkins, who has questioned the SEC’s crypto crackdown, signals that the agency is likely to be far friendlier to the digital assets industry. In a podcast appearance last year, Atkins said that greater SEC accommodation and straightforward engagement with such firms could encourage more activity within the United States.

Atkins has also been critical of the Dodd-Frank regulation that emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, citing inefficiencies, overreach, and lack of transparency.

“Despite a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to streamline our crazy quilt of financial services regulators, the Dodd-Frank authors blew it,” he said at an Investment Adviser Association compliance conference in 2015. “They created, depending on how you count, at least 15 new offices and agencies, eliminating only one, the hapless Office of Thrift Supervision, which had no one left to regulate, anyway.”

Atkins served as an SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush, where he championed transparency and regulatory consistency. After departing from the SEC in 2009, Atkins founded Patomak Global Partners, a consulting firm, where he continues to serve as CEO.

As SEC commissioner, Atkins opposed high corporate penalties, emphasizing their harm to shareholders, and advocated for balanced regulations that protect investors without stifling market efficiency.

Since 2017, he has served as co-chairman of the Digital Chamber’s Token Alliance, focusing on the digital assets industry.

Atkins worked in the first Trump administration as a member of the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum, an advisory group of top CEOs and business leaders focused on job creation and economic growth.

Aligning with Atkins’s view of Dodd-Frank as excessively burdensome, Trump expressed criticism for the package during one of the forum’s meetings in 2017, calling Dodd-Frank “horrendous” and vowing to overhaul it.

“You can take a look at Dodd-Frank,” Trump told the participants: “For the bankers in the room, they'll be very happy, because we’re really doing a major streamlining and, perhaps, elimination, and replacing it with something else. But that will be the minimum.

“But we’re doing a major elimination of the horrendous Dodd-Frank regulations, keeping some, obviously, but getting rid of many.”

In May 2018, Trump signed a bipartisan bill amending Dodd-Frank, raising the asset threshold for banks subject to enhanced regulatory scrutiny from $50 billion to $250 billion, easing regulations for many small and regional banks.

The bill also provided exemptions from the Volcker Rule, which limits speculative trading, for institutions with less than $10 billion in assets.

Overall, the changes aimed to support community banks and encourage economic growth by easing compliance costs and restrictions for smaller financial institutions, while maintaining oversight of the largest and most complex banks.

“Dodd-Frank was something they said could not be touched. And honestly, a lot of great Democrats knew that it had to be done and they joined us in the effort,” Trump said before he signed the bill, surrounded by lawmakers from both major parties.

“And there is something so nice about bipartisan, and we’re going to have to try more of it. Let’s do more of it.”