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

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor

Empower any three SEC Commissioners to place an item on the agenda

Not started

832 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Ensure that any three SEC Commissioners are empowered to place an item on the agenda and to receive adequate staff support to do so even without the Chairman’s support.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The SEC's agenda is still set by the Chairman. Section 4(a) of the Exchange Act and the Commission's Rules of Organization give the Chairman the executive and administrative functions of the Commission, including the scheduling of matters, and nothing in the window changes that or creates a right for any three Commissioners to place an item on the agenda with staff support. A quoted full-text search of every SEC rule and proposed rule since 2025-01-20 for 'three Commissioners' and for 'Commission agenda' returns zero. The two governance rules the Commission did adopt run the other way, toward the Chairman and the staff rather than toward individual Commissioners: the amended Rules of Practice of 2025-09-19 govern Commission review of staff actions taken under delegated authority, and the Modernization of Delegations of Authority to Commission Staff of 2026-07-20 widens what staff may decide without the Commission. The Regulatory Flexibility Agenda published 2026-08-14 records that its entries 'reflect only the priorities of the Chairman'. No bill of the 119th Congress addresses SEC agenda-setting. **The Commission's own statements have now been enumerated (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06) and they confirm the arrangement rather than disturb it.** All 350 speeches and statements the Commission published in 2025 and 2026 were listed; none concerns agenda-setting or the rights of Commissioners to place an item on it. What the Chairman does say, in his statement on the 2026 Regulatory Agenda of 2026-07-07, is that "[t]he 2026 Regulatory Agenda reflects the robust rulemaking we are pursuing under my chairmanship" and that the agency's direction is "a charge that will guide the Commission as we continue to enact this important agenda" - the agenda described in the first person, as his. The Commission's complete policy-statement index carries two entries in the window, on mandatory arbitration provisions and on criminal referrals, and neither touches Commission procedure of this kind.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The instrument would be either an amendment to 17 CFR part 200 subpart A (the Commission’s Conduct of Business and Rules of Organization) or a statute amending Exchange Act section 4(a). Neither exists. The Commission amended part 201 (Rules of Practice) and part 200 subpart A’s delegation sections in the window, both times in the direction of delegating more, not of distributing agenda control.
  • The agenda’s own words are the cleanest evidence of the status quo. The Regulatory Flexibility Agenda published on 2026-08-14 opens by saying the items listed “reflect only the priorities of the Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and do not necessarily reflect the views and priorities of any individual Commissioner” (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/14/2026-16619/regulatory-flexibility-agenda). That is the arrangement the Quote wants changed, restated in the window.
  • Readable after all (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). sec.gov refuses a bare curl and a browser User-Agent and answers 200 with full content to the full Chrome header set, the third rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs. sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements pages with ?year=&page=; 350 distinct 2025 and 2026 statements were enumerated and grepped. Two slugs match “agenda”, both the Chairman’s own annual statements on the regulatory agenda (2025-09-04 and 2026-07-07). No Commissioner statement in either year concerns agenda-setting rights. That is as close to a complete answer as this ask admits of.
  • This is one of the chapter’s unverifiable-by-construction asks in the sense of .scratch/lower-tiers/plan.md: an internal management practice with no public instrument unless someone chooses to publish one.
Action
create
Object
authority of three SEC Commissioners to set the Commission agenda
ID
2147