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Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.
“Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins “also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before”.
In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
Atkins and Slater must be confirmed by the US Senate. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Industry participants hailed the nomination of Atkins, who served as SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 and later founded Patomak Global Partners, a risk management consultancy.
“We look forward to working with him to rebuild the public’s trust and confidence in the agency,” Chris Iacovella, president and chief executive of the American Securities Association, said in a statement.
The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.
He targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear.
Atkins is expected to adopt a friendlier approach to crypto. He said on a podcast last year that a fragmented US financial regulatory network increases costs and risks producing rules that impede innovation.
In reference to crypto, Atkins said that the SEC “should be there with its ear to the ground to . . . accommodate activity that’s not criminal and then enable markets to flourish, because if it challenges incumbents and it helps to bring down costs for investors and for people who are trying to raise capital, I mean that’s the reason why we have financial markets”.
Atkins has also been critical of the US audit watchdog, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which regulates accounting firms and is overseen by the SEC. During his previous stint at the SEC, Atkins pushed to reduce the organisation’s budget and argued against some of the rules it was imposing on auditors.
Lynn Turner, a member of the PCAOB’s investor advisory group, said the appointment was possibly the worst outcome for the watchdog, “short of an atomic bomb hitting their building”.
If Atkins may pursue a lighter agenda, Slater is expected to sustain the tough antitrust stance championed by Biden-appointed progressive officials, who focused in particular on Big Tech.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social that Big Tech had “run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector” while “using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
“I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership,” he added.
Her nomination underlines Trump’s embrace of a new generation of Republican populists spearheaded by Vance. They seek to use antitrust law to address hot-button social issues, including free speech and the alleged censoring of conservative voices on online platforms.
The Financial Times previously reported that Slater was a top contender for the DoJ role, which is currently held by Jonathan Kanter.
An Oxford-educated lawyer, Slater was an adviser to Julie Brill, a former Federal Trade Commission commissioner appointed by Barack Obama.
Additional reporting by Stephen Foley and Jennifer Hughes
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