Reduce the number of SEC managers per employee

Research notes

• What was searched. The SEC’s entire Federal Register rulemaking record for the window (57 rules and proposed rules, read by title) and its full active Unified Agenda (42 RINs on reginfo.gov, 2026 publication) contain no entry on management structure. bills.ndjson has no bill on SEC staffing ratios. H.R. 9329, the one SEC restructuring bill to reach a committee vote, was read in full: “managers” and “supervisor” appear zero times (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr9329ih/html/BILLS-119hr9329ih.htm).
• The government-wide directive, and why it is a lead rather than Evidence. Executive Order 14210 of 2025-02-11, Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization Initiative (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/14/2025-02762/implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-workforce-optimization-initiative), defines “Agency” by reference to 44 U.S.C. 3502 with only the Executive Office of the President carved out, so it does reach the SEC. Its operative text was read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-02-14/html/2025-02762.htm and contains no occurrence of “manager” or “supervisor”: it sets a hiring ratio and orders reduction plans, not a supervisory ratio. It is not a directive to do what this Quote asks, so it does not move the Status.
• Correction, 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04): the number exists, and it is GAO’s. Both walls this item was bounded by turn out to be passable. sec.gov opens to the full browser header set — the FY2026 and FY2027 Congressional Budget Justifications and the 2026 SEC Official Org Chart (https://www.sec.gov/files/secorg.pdf) were read and searched for “supervisor”, “span of control”, “direct report”, “realign”, “reorganiz”, “merged” and “abolish”, and the SEC itself publishes no supervisory ratio in any of them. But gao.gov does. GAO reports triennially on the quality of SEC personnel management under a Dodd-Frank provision, and the current report, GAO-26-107813 (2026-03-27), carries both the policy and the numbers. It is now the item’s Evidence.
• How the GAO page was found, because an earlier pass concluded it did not exist. GAO’s /agencies/<slug> route works, but the obvious slugs 404 — securities-and-exchange-commission, securities-exchange-commission, us-securities-exchange-commission, securities-and-exchange-commission-0 and sec were all tried on 2026-09-03 and all returned HTTP 404. The live slug is united-states-securities-exchange-commission, and it was found by paging https://www.gao.gov/agencies?page=0…7 and grepping the hrefs. gao.gov/search?q=… is a JavaScript shell returning no prose, so it cannot be used for a negative; the agency page can.
• Read the direction of the ratio carefully. GAO’s tables give nonsupervisors per supervisor, so a rising number is what this Quote asks for and a falling number is the opposite. Seven of nine mission-critical units fell in FY2025.
• The other in-window GAO products on the SEC (from the agency page, read 2026-09-03) are GAO-26-108959 Priority Open Recommendations: SEC (2026-06-10), GAO-26-107823 Updating Assessments of Staff Procedures Could Improve Key Agency Operations (2026-03-27), GAO-26-107650 Protections For Whistleblowers and Others (2026-03-03), GAO-26-107978 Financial Audit: SEC’s FY 2025 Financial Statements (2026-01-16) and GAO-25-107500 Sarbanes-Oxley Act: Compliance Costs (2025-06-18). None of them is a further ratio product.
• Headcount is not the ratio. Total FTE across the two justifications: 4,920 (FY2024 actual), 4,548 (FY2025 enacted, FY2026 CBJ), 4,024 (FY2026 enacted) and 4,177 requested for FY2027, which the FY2027 justification presents as “a decrease of about 365 FTEs compared to the FY 2025 level” (https://www.sec.gov/files/fy-2027-congressional-budget-justification.pdf, read 2026-09-03). A fall of that size tells a reader nothing about how many of the remaining staff are managers, so it is recorded here rather than cited as Evidence.