Warren Accuses SEC Chair Atkins of Misleading Congress on Enforcement Data

Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling out SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, accusing him of potentially fibbing to Congress about the agency's enforcement track record. Warren, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, fired off a letter to Atkins on Wednesday asserting that the SEC's enforcement statistics for fiscal year 2025, published on April 7, raised "significant concerns" about his testimony during a Feb. 12 congressional hearing. "At the hearing, I specifically asked you to comment on publicly available data highlighting a decline in SEC enforcement activity," Warren noted. "In response, you hemmed and hawed, claiming you were 'not sure what data' I was referencing."

"Now, it is clear that my assertion regarding the SEC's declining enforcement actions was correct: the data you released last week show that the number of enforcement actions initiated by the SEC was lower than at any point in the last decade," she added. Warren pointed out the hearing came more than four months after fiscal year 2025 concluded, and Atkins' "deflection and claim to be unsure of the 'data' I was examining now appear deeply misleading, potentially designed to cast doubt on the now obvious fact that enforcement activity has declined significantly at the Commission under your watch."

Under the Trump administration, the SEC has eased off on enforcement actions against crypto firms, settling or dropping crypto-related cases initiated during the Biden era, sparking criticism from some quarters of Congress. Warren called the SEC's enforcement data "deeply disturbing" and said it showed the agency had "largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities" as enforcement actions hit their lowest level in over 20 years. She told Atkins that given this data, his answers during the February hearing "were deeply troubling and raise concerns that you may have been deliberately trying to mislead the Committee about the state of SEC enforcement."

Warren's letter posed several questions to Atkins about whether he was aware of the SEC's enforcement picture at the time of his testimony and demanded he account for the agency's enforcement decline, with an April 28 deadline for his response. The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.