Cut the number of direct reports to the SEC Chairman

Research notes

• The bill is the ask, almost word for word. H.R. 9329 §901(a) (SEC Reform and Restructuring Act, ordered reported 2026-06-30, 28-23) requires the Chairman to review “the organizational structure of the Commission, including the offices and officials that report directly to the Chairman” and then to “reduce the number of offices and officials reporting directly to the Chairman by reassigning such offices and officials within the organizational structure of the Commission”, with a report to both committees identifying which reporting relationships are required by statute. Text at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr9329ih/html/BILLS-119hr9329ih.htm; history at https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/119/hr/BILLSTATUS-119hr9329.xml. A bill ordered reported has not passed anything, so the Status does not move and the bill is named here rather than carried as Evidence.
• Nothing in the published record. The Commission’s Rules of General Organization (17 CFR 200) were amended once in the window, by Modernization of Delegations of Authority to Commission Staff (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/20/2026-14540/modernization-of-delegations-of-authority-to-commission-staff), which redistributes delegated registration authorities and corrects two office descriptions. It changes no reporting line. Its footnote 13 refers to “a recent internal reorganization” that changed division names, without describing it — the only published hint that the agency reorganized at all.
• The wall is gone; the chart was read (2026-09-03, read-queue ticket 04). sec.gov opens to the full browser header set, and https://www.sec.gov/files/secorg.pdf — titled “2026 SEC Official Org Chart” in its own PDF metadata, created 2026-03-13 and modified 2026-03-24 — carries the current reporting lines. Text extraction alone cannot answer this ask, because the chart encodes reporting in line style, not in text: solid for “Report directly to the Chairman”, dashed for “Report directly to the Commission”, dotted for “Independent office” (the colors are entity types — Divisions, Offices, Regional Offices). The chart was therefore rendered at 150 and 300 dpi and read as an image. What it shows is in the Status note above.
• What still cannot be established, and it is not a fetch failure. The SEC publishes one org chart, the current one, at a fixed filename. There is no January 2025 chart to count against, so a before-and-after count of direct reports cannot be made from charts at all. The datable baseline is the Congressional Budget Justification series, and it runs against the ask: OIT moved out from under the Chief Operating Officer between the FY2026 and FY2027 justifications, adding a top-level office.
• Two other in-window structural changes, neither of which cuts direct reports. The Office of Investor Education and Advocacy is now the Office of Investor Education and Assistance — the FY2026 CBJ says Advocacy, the FY2027 CBJ and the 2026 chart say Assistance. A rename, not a merger. And the Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology (FinHub) is gone: the FY2026 CBJ shows it at 8 FTE for FY2024 actual and ”—” for FY2025 enacted and the FY2026 request, and it appears in neither the FY2027 CBJ nor the 2026 chart. The zeroing shows in the FY2025 enacted column, i.e. the fiscal year beginning October 2024, so it may predate 2025-01-20; the date is unresolved and FinHub is therefore not counted here.
• The one report that describes the reorganization, and what it does not say. GAO-26-107813, Securities and Exchange Commission: Recent Workforce Reductions and Other Personnel Management Changes (2026-03-27, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107813), is the only allowlisted account of the SEC’s 2025 internal restructuring. It records that the September 2025 voluntary early retirement and separation offers were made “[a]s part of its plans to reorganize its information technology functions and improve supervisory ratios”, and that OHR’s strategies included “combining groups that perform the same function”. Nothing in it says the number of offices or officials reporting to the Chairman was cut, and the IT reorganization it names is the one the FY2027 justification shows moving OIT up a level. It is cited on #2154, whose ask it does reach, and recorded here so a later pass does not read it as covering this one.
• A correction to a premise this item was researched under. The delegations rule’s amendment to Article 13a(c) — the library “function has been reassigned within the agency” — is not an in-window reorganization. The FY2025 CBJ (PDF created 2024-03-05) already describes the Office of the Chief Data Officer as promoting “effective management of the agency’s Library and third-party research and data resources” and tabulates Library Reference and Library Acquisitions workload under OCDO; the FY2026 and FY2027 justifications repeat it. The library moved before the window opened, and the 2026 rule is housekeeping catching the Rules of General Organization up to a pre-window fact. Footnote 13’s “recent internal reorganization” is likewise offered only as a reason for “technical corrections … to reflect current division names” in 17 CFR 203.2; it is not itself a documented reorganization event.