Caroline Crenshaw made the remarks at this week’s “The SEC Speaks in 2025” conference, where she said the United States is dismantling its regulatory infrastructure, with the SEC ignoring the rise of “significant risks” in areas like cryptocurrency, the report said.
“This is a dangerous game,” Crenshaw said, per the report. “We are pulling apart our own regulatory foundation — block by block, case by case, and rule by rule. It feels all too familiar to those of us who have lived through 2008.”
She likened the regulatory structure to the game of Jenga, saying there are now pieces being removed that threaten its integrity. Chief among them is the loss of SEC staff, with Crenshaw estimating that close to 15% of SEC workers have left, due to retirements, resignations or “simply the specter of random firings,” the report said.
The President Donald Trump administration is expected to lay off more than 2,300 staffers across the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the SEC.
Even before taking office, Trump and his team signaled an intent to scale back financial regulatory bodies by shrinking, consolidating or eliminating the agencies.
Since then, the administration has attempted to cut staffing levels at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by 90%, while also paring down the agency’s regulation efforts.
Meanwhile, the SEC has dropped or dismissed legal actions against several of the cryptocurrency sector’s biggest names.
“It’s a multifaceted demolition of the most successful SEC enforcement program in history,” John Reed Stark, an SEC enforcement attorney-turned-consultant, said in March.
Since Trump took office, Stark said, the commission’s stance has been: “We’re going to grind to a screeching halt every single aspect of the SEC crypto enforcement program in a manner that’s not just unprecedented and unusual, it’s beyond imagination.”
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said last week that the regulator needs to consider regulatory changes to accommodate on-chain securities and other crypto assets.
Speaking to the Crypto Task Force Roundtable on Tokenization, Atkins said rules designed for off-chain securities may hinder the growth of blockchain technology, and the commission aims to contribute to Trump’s vision of the U.S. becoming the “crypto capital of the planet.”
