SEC sharply criticizes Gary Gensler’s era for “enforcing for headline purposes,” announcing an end to aggressive crypto regulation and a return to targeting real fraud

The U.S. SEC released its enforcement report for fiscal year 2025 on April 7, 2025. Across the year, it launched 456 enforcement actions and obtained $17.9 billion in penalties orders. New Chair Paul Atkins sharply criticized the previous administration’s approach of “enforcing for media headlines,” declaring that the SEC would fully return to its original mission of “protecting investors from material fraud,” and would significantly revise its aggressive regulatory playbook for the crypto industry.
(Background: The U.S. SEC approved options listing on NYSE American for “multi-currency crypto ETFs,” and Wall Street’s hedging tools have leveled up again)
(Additional background: SEC Chair Atkins’ remarks on “crypto interpretation orders”: this is just the beginning—the key is the stablecoin bill that achieves 99% coverage)

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• Opened the year with $17.9 billion in fines, reaffirming the return to the core of “preventing fraud”
• Bitterly criticizes the prior administration’s misallocation of resources, adjusts the crypto-coin enforcement route
• New chair sets the tone: ending “regulation through enforcement”

The SEC’s enforcement outlook in the United States is moving toward a historic, major turning point. On April 7, the SEC officially released the enforcement results for fiscal year 2025, covering through September 30, 2025. This report is not only a summary of the past year, but also a strong reckoning and full break by the current management with the aggressive regulatory line pursued during the tenure of former chair Gary Gensler.

Opened the year with $17.9 billion in fines, reaffirming the return to the core of “preventing fraud”

The report notes that during fiscal year 2025, the SEC initiated 456 enforcement actions in total (including 303 stand-alone actions) and secured orders for $17.9 billion in disgorgements of ill-gotten gains and civil penalty amounts. The SEC emphasized that these actions covered conduct such as securities issuance fraud, market manipulation, insider trading, and violations of fiduciary duties, demonstrating the current commission’s priority focus on “directly causing material harm to investors and market integrity.”

Notably, this fiscal year was also a year of an unprecedented transition period for the SEC’s enforcement division. The report unusually used very harsh language, directly pointing to the prior commission (referring to the Gensler team) during the period when, to pursue media headlines and drive up case counts ahead of the presidential inauguration, it had sparked a wave of “unprecedented enforcement fever” and had aggressively misused novel legal theories.

Bitterly criticizes the prior administration’s misallocation of resources, adjusts the crypto-coin enforcement route

In the report, the current SEC team directly called out that since fiscal year 2022, the prior administration issued 95 fines totaling $2.3 billion for companies failing to retain off-channel communications records, and brought multiple lawsuits targeting crypto companies’ registration and the “dealer definition.” The current SEC believes these cases are completely unable to prove that investors suffered direct harm; beyond a misunderstanding of federal securities laws, they represent a serious misallocation of resources.

For the crypto industry, the SEC announced that in fiscal year 2025 it made “necessary course corrections.” Although it would no longer continue the approach of broad-based crackdowns, the SEC emphasized that it would still aggressively pursue conduct that uses new technology to commit fraud. To that end, the commission established the “Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit” in February 2025 to support the work of the crypto task force, focusing on material fraud cases involving blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity.

New chair sets the tone: ending “regulation through enforcement”

New SEC Chair Paul S. Atkins strongly endorsed this shift in direction. He said:

“Over the past year, the commission has ended the approach of ‘Regulation by enforcement’ and has re-focused its enforcement plan on its core mission. We have shifted resources away from chasing case volume and exorbitant penalties, and toward fighting fraud and manipulation that truly causes significant harm.”

Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda also voiced full support for this shift, emphasizing that the SEC will return to historical norms—focusing on coherent and transparent policy-making, rather than using enforcement power as a tool for signaling policy. Going forward, the SEC will place greater emphasis on holding “individual” wrongdoers accountable for violations and actively work to return lost funds to harmed investors.