Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Major · Needs Congress

Abolish the PCAOB and FINRA and merge their functions into the SEC

Attempted

830 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“To reduce costs and improve transparency, due process, congressional oversight, and responsiveness, PCAOB and FINRA should be abolished, and their regulatory functions should be merged into the SEC.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The House passed H.R. 1, the reconciliation bill, 215-214. Section 50002 of the House-passed text would have abolished the PCAOB in all but name: on a transfer date it moved "the duties and powers of the Board" to the SEC, barred the SEC from spending money to oversee the Board, ended the Board's accounting-support fee, and transferred its intellectual property, keeping existing Board auditing standards in force until the SEC changed them. FINRA was not touched. The Senate then dropped it: H.R. 1 was enacted as Public Law 119-21 (2025-07-04) without section 50002, and the enrolled law contains no reference to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The PCAOB continues to operate — the SEC approved its budget and annual accounting support fee for fiscal 2026 on 2026-01-26. That refusal is recorded here rather than as an event of its own: a refusal is not an attempt.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The ask has two objects and only one of them moved. FINRA is untouched: the only bill on it, H.R. 2689 (2025-04-07), “To amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to transfer authorities and duties of registered national securities associations to the Securities and Exchange Commission,” was introduced and referred to House Financial Services and has not moved since. Introduction is not a step by a chamber, so it does not raise the Status on its own.
  • The enrolled text of Public Law 119-21 was checked directly for “Public Company Accounting Oversight” and returns no hits; the House-passed engrossed text returns the section-50002 provision quoted above. Both were loaded from govinfo on 2026-08-27.
  • The only PCAOB bill of the 119th Congress is the PCAOB Enforcement Transparency Act of 2025 (S. 2919, introduced 2025-09-19), which reforms rather than abolishes the Board.
Action
abolish
Object
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and FINRA
ID
2125