Eliminate SEC administrative proceedings except registration stop orders

Research notes

The Mandate asks for one of two things: abolish all SEC administrative proceedings except stop orders on defective registration statements, or let respondents elect an Article III court. Neither has happened.

• Searched and empty. Federal Register full text, SEC only, since 2025-01-20: "administrative proceedings" restricted to rules and proposed rules returns two documents, neither on point (the 2026-05-21 rescission of the “no-deny” settlement policy and the 2026-04-20 Consolidated Audit Trail concept release); "administrative law judge" returns zero across all document types.
• The agenda says nothing either. The SEC’s whole active Unified Agenda — https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaMain?operation=OPERATION_GET_AGENCY_RULE_LIST&currentPub=true&agencyCode=&showStage=active&agencyCd=3235 (42 RINs, 2026 publication, loaded 2026-09-01) — carries no entry on the Rules of Practice or on adjudication. Per the reading settled on this chapter’s earlier page block, an agenda entry would be an intention rather than a rung in any case; what matters here is that there is not even an intention.
• What the Commission did do on its Rules of Practice was procedural: it added registration-statement effectiveness determinations to the list of delegated actions that are not automatically stayed on a petition for review (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/19/2025-18237/commissions-rules-of-practice, effective 2025-09-19). That is the opposite end of the rulebook from the ask.
• Pre-window background, not progress. SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109 (2024), decided 2024-06-27, held that a defendant facing SEC civil penalties for fraud is entitled to a jury trial, which removed one class of case from the administrative forum. It predates the evidence window and it does not reach the ask, which covers every AP other than registration stop orders. pre_satisfied is therefore not set.
• The wall is gone, and so is the bound (2026-09-03, read-queue ticket 04). sec.gov opens to the full browser header set. The earlier note said the negative was “strong on rulemaking and legislation and weak on agency practice” because the ALJ docket and the Commission’s reports could not be read. They can, and the Commission measures its own practice directly, so §3b’s “a negative search must say how far it reaches” clause no longer needs to be invoked for this item. Read on 2026-09-03: https://www.sec.gov/reports (the complete dated report index, 2023 to 2026-09-02), the three in-window Rule 900 reports as PDFs (34-102958, 34-104392, 34-105337 — each restates the prior two periods, so the figures cross-check), https://www.sec.gov/alj, https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/administrative-law-judges-decisions and https://www.sec.gov/enforcement/administrative-proceedings/open-litigated-administrative-proceedings.
• What the ALJ record shows. Three initial decisions since 2025-01-20 — Nano Magic Inc. (Release 1416, 2025-07-23, on a petition to terminate a trading suspension) and Epic Capital Wealth Advisors (Releases 1417 and 1418, 2025-08-08 and 2026-02-11, both in File No. 3-22307, an Advisers Act § 203(c)(2)(b) registration proceeding). The next-most-recent initial decision before those is May 2023. Median age at initial decision fell from 194 days (Apr–Sep 2025) to 82 days (Oct 2025–Mar 2026), and every in-window initial decision met Rule 900’s ten-month guideline. The Open Litigated Administrative Proceedings list runs to file number 3-22692. The ALJ Initial Decisions index is undated as a page, so the decisions are cited rather than the index.