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

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Notable

Terminate the Consolidated Audit Trail program

Attempted

831 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Terminate the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) program.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The Commission published a concept release opening a comprehensive review of the CAT, and put termination on the table in terms. Question 3 asks: 'Should the Commission eliminate the CAT in favor of developing a different audit trail and/or data source to enable necessary regulatory use cases?' Question 2 asks which features could be eliminated because other data sources could replace them, and questions 4 and 5 ask whether the CAT should continue to be structured as a national market system plan at all. A concept release solicits comment; it neither proposes nor adopts anything, and the CAT was still operating on 2026-09-01.

  2. Not started

    The Commission moved the other way: less than eight months after the Eleventh Circuit vacated the 2023 CAT funding order, it approved a replacement funding model for the same program. Petitioners' account of it, in their stay motion, is that the new order is one the SEC "admits is 'substantively identical'" to the vacated one (their characterization, quoting 91 Fed. Reg. 13410, 13415, not a Commission statement in its own voice). The courts have declined to stop it: *American Securities Association and Citadel Securities LLC v. SEC*, No. 26-10936 (11th Cir.), is a petition for review of this order, and on 2026-07-14 the panel denied the stay because petitioners "ha[d] not made the requisite showing" under *Nken*. Merits briefing closed 2026-07-30 with amicus briefs from SIFMA and PTG Markets accepted; nothing has been decided. Re-funding a program is not terminating it, so this event is `not-started` on this Quote even though the concept release a month later carries the item higher.

  3. Attempted

    The Commission approved the CAT NMS Plan's Customer and Account Information System amendment, codifying the 2020 and 2025 exemptive relief and letting the SROs delete historical customer and account-level data, names, addresses and years of birth for foreign natural persons, legal entities and authorized traders, and employer identification numbers. This is the largest reduction in the CAT's scope since it was built, and it is still a reduction rather than a termination: the audit trail continues to collect order and execution data across every market.

  4. Attempted

    The Eleventh Circuit vacated the SEC's 2023 CAT Funding Order and remanded, holding the Commission had not done the economic analysis the Exchange Act requires before allocating historical and prospective CAT costs, and staying its judgment for sixty days after the mandate so the Commission could redo the work. The funding mechanism, not the program, was struck: the CAT itself continued to operate throughout and the exchanges filed replacement industry-member fee schedules for the second half of 2025. Earlier in the window the Commission had already narrowed what the CAT collects, granting the SROs exemptive relief on 2025-02-14 from the obligation to report and retain names, addresses and years of birth for natural persons.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Three things happened to the CAT in the window and none of them is termination: its funding order was vacated by a court, its customer-data collection was cut back by Commission order, and the Commission asked the public whether to eliminate it. The program is still running.
  • Both live cases were read on 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04); neither stops the CAT.
    • Citadel Securities LLC v. Consolidated Audit Trail, LLC, No. 1:26-cv-00134 (D.D.C.): complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief filed 2026-01-16 with a motion for preliminary injunction the same day, voluntarily dismissed 2026-02-23. No order ever issued.
    • American Securities Association and Citadel Securities LLC v. SEC, No. 26-10936 (11th Cir., docketed 2026-03-24): a petition for review of SEC Release No. 34-105003, the 2026 funding order, now recorded as a Status event above. The stay was denied 2026-07-14; the case is pending, fully briefed since 2026-07-30, with no decision. Under §3’s rule that “blocked requires an order in force” and “pending lawsuits do not block”, it changes nothing here.
    • The bulk snapshot’s 2026-06-30 cutoff no longer bounds this item: the docket page and the CourtListener search API are live-indexed and were used past it.
    • The 2025 opinion cited above was read from the Eleventh Circuit’s own PDF; its CourtListener page (https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10641423/american-securities-association-v-us-securities-and-exchange-commission/) would not load.
  • What “eliminate” would take. The CAT exists because of Rule 613 of Regulation NMS and the CAT NMS Plan approved under it. Terminating it means rescinding Rule 613 and withdrawing plan approval, or a statute. The Commission’s Regulatory Flexibility Agenda of 2026-08-14 lists no Rule 613 rescission in either the proposed-rule or long-term stages.
  • Exemptive relief as a running theme. Between 2025-01-23 and 2026-01-27 the Commission issued at least eight Exchange Act section 36(a)(1) orders relieving CAT participants of particular plan requirements - timestamp granularity, representative orders, request-for-quote reporting, port-level settings. Those are cited on #2129 as evidence of exemptive practice, not here.
  • 2026-09-03 (scan triage 2026-09-06): the Commission noticed the SROs’ request for exemption from the CAT NMS Plan’s provisions on recovering costs incurred during Period 4 of the Financial Accountability Milestones (Release No. 34-106237, File No. 4-698). Another funding wrinkle, not a termination; the CAT was still operating on that date.
Action
eliminate
Object
the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) program
ID
2140