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

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor · Needs Congress

Create an independent commission to report on moving SRO functions to the SEC

Not started

830 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Furthermore, Congress should establish an independent board or commission and charge it with producing a detailed report within 18 months that examines the degree to which the regulatory functions of the various other so-called self-regulatory organizations (SROs), which are no longer self-regulatory in any meaningful sense, should be moved to the SEC.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No independent board or commission on the regulatory functions of self-regulatory organizations has been established, and no bill of the 119th Congress would create one. The two SRO bills in the window do something else: H.R. 2689 (introduced 2025-04-07, referred to House Financial Services and not moved since) would transfer FINRA's authorities to the SEC outright rather than commission a study, and S. 3935, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board Reform Act of 2026 (introduced 2026-02-26, referred to Senate Banking), restructures one SRO rather than reviewing them all. The SEC's own in-window review of an SRO-run system - the April 2026 Consolidated Audit Trail concept release - asks whether the CAT should remain a national market system plan, not whether SRO regulatory functions should move to the Commission. Queries are recorded in docs/research/ch-27.md.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The ask names an instrument Congress alone can create: a statutory board or commission with an 18-month reporting deadline. Nothing of the kind exists. The Corpus’s bills.ndjson returns no 119th-Congress measure whose title or subject is an SRO commission, review board or study commission on self-regulation.
  • Adjacent and not this ask, so neither raises the Status (playbook §3b, “progress is measured on this ask”):
    • H.R. 2689, “To amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to transfer authorities and duties of registered national securities associations to the Securities and Exchange Commission” (2025-04-07), which would move FINRA’s functions without any study first. It was referred and has not moved; it is also the instrument #2125 tracks.
    • S. 3935, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board Reform Act of 2026 (2026-02-26), referred to Senate Banking.
  • The nearest thing to the review the Quote wants is the SEC’s own Concept Release on the Consolidated Audit Trail (2026-04-20), which asks whether the CAT should continue to be structured as an SRO-run national market system plan. That is a question about one system’s governance, not an independent commission on SRO regulatory functions, and it is the Commission asking itself rather than Congress chartering a body. It is cited on #2140, not here.
Action
create
Object
an independent board or commission on SRO regulatory functions
ID
2126