Since its creation nearly a century ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been one of the country’s premier regulatory agencies, protecting investors from misconduct by large corporations and other players in financial markets.
In the early 2000s the SEC investigated accounting fraud by the likes of Enron and Worldcom. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it brought major enforcement actions against Wall Street banks for packaging and selling toxic securities. It has brought thousands of other cases against perpetrators of market manipulation, insider trading, and foreign bribery.
You wouldn’t know this by looking at the recent track record of the agency. Under Trump 2.0 this once fierce regulator is a shadow of its former self. The watchdog has lost its bite.
The enfeeblement of the SEC is highlighted in a new report from Cornerstone Research focusing on the agency’s accounting and auditing enforcement actions. It finds that the number of such cases initiated by the SEC in 2025 dropped 68 percent from the year before and reached the lowest number since 2017.
At the same time, the total monetary settlements collected by the agency in accounting and auditing cases dropped to just $31 million, a plunge from the $907 million figure in 2024. Some 98 percent of the 2025 amount was collected during the final few weeks of the Biden Administration, meaning that under Trump 2.0 the penalties have been next to nothing.
The picture is slightly less dismal in the data collected for Violation Tracker covering SEC cases of all kinds against companies. It shows that total penalties during the first 12 months of Trump 2.0 were $298 million, down from $1.6 billion during Biden’s final year. The average penalty sank from $25 million to $5 million.
One reason for the drop is a shift in the typical defendant. Biden’s SEC brought more cases against big investment banks and other larger corporations, while under Trump the resolved matters are more likely to involve small-time players.
Even more worrying is the SEC decision to largely abandon enforcement actions against certain categories of companies, especially those involved in cryptocurrency. After Trump did an about-face on crypto, the SEC withdrew dozens of lawsuits involving that sector. That included major investigations of companies such as Coinbase and Binance. All this, of course, occurred as the Trump family itself invested heavily in crypto and got a boost from the founder of Binance.
The SEC also seems to be abandoning its role with regard to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under Trump 2.0 the agency has not resolved a single foreign bribery case. During Biden’s final year, five such cases were completed, including one in which the weapons producer RTX Corporation (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies) paid $124 million to settle a civil case involving improper payments made to assist in obtaining contracts with the Qatari military.
Both at home and abroad, corruption is being given a freer rein by the SEC and the rest of the Trump Administration.
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