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

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor

Use the SEC's general exemptive authority far more often

Partially done

830 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Congress has given the SEC broad “general exemptive authority,” but the SEC has used this authority only rarely. It should use this authority significantly more often to reduce the regulatory burden on issuers, particularly smaller entrepreneurs.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The first proposed use in the window of the Securities Act's own general exemptive authority for the benefit of small issuers. Regulation Crypto Assets would create two exemptions from section 5 registration - a startup exemption of up to $5 million over four years and a fundraising exemption of up to $75 million a year modeled on Regulation A - and the release states in terms that the fundraising exemption is proposed 'pursuant to the Commission's exemptive authority under section 28 of the Securities Act'. It remains a proposal, and it reaches only crypto-asset issuers rather than smaller entrepreneurs generally.

  2. Partially done

    The Commission has used its general exemptive authority in the window, and used it to open a door that had been shut for years - but for fund complexes rather than for the smaller entrepreneurs the Quote emphasizes. On 2026-03-20 it granted conditional exemptive relief under Exchange Act section 36 from Rules 10b-10 and 14e-5 and section 11(d)(1) for multi-class ETFs, the Exchange Act half of the relief that lets a registered open-end fund add an exchange-traded share class; the Investment Company Act section 6(c) half was noticed from 2025-12-22 and repeated through 2026. Alongside it the Commission issued a steady run of Exchange Act section 36(a)(1) orders across the window, but almost all of those relieve exchanges, clearing agencies and broker-dealers of market-structure requirements rather than relieving issuers.

  3. Attempted

    The policy the earlier pass could not find is the Chairman's, and it is dated. Announcing Project Crypto at America's Blockchain Summit on 2025-07-31, Chairman Atkins said that while staff work on rules "the Commission and its staff will in the coming months consider using interpretative, exemptive, and other authorities to make sure that archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America"; that he had "asked staff to propose purpose-fit disclosures, exemptions, and safe harbors"; that he had "directed the staff to consider how best to adapt the existing regime to facilitate the custody of crypto assets, including possible exemptive or other relief"; and that the Commission was "contemplating an innovation exemption that would allow registrants and non-registrants to quickly go to market with new business models and services that do not neatly fit within our existing rules and regulations". That is a stated intent to use the authority more, from the person who sets the agenda, and it is `attempted`: on the day it was said nothing had been granted under it. It is also narrower than the Quote, which asks for relief for issuers generally and smaller entrepreneurs particularly, not for one asset class. No **Commission** policy statement says the same thing: the Commission's complete policy-statement index carries only two in the window, on mandatory arbitration provisions (2025-09-17) and on agency referrals for potential criminal enforcement (2025-06-16).

Research log

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

Research notes

  • What the ask measures is a rate, and a rate needs a baseline the Corpus cannot supply. The Corpus begins on 2025-01-20, so “significantly more often” than before cannot be computed from it. What can be established is that the authority was used, repeatedly, and used for at least two categories of issuer. That is why the Status is partial and not done: a piece is delivered, and the piece the Quote cares about most - relief aimed at smaller entrepreneurs - is only proposed.
  • The shape of the exemptive docket. Filtering the Federal Register Corpus for SEC documents whose title contains “Exempt” returns roughly sixty non-SRO records in the window. The great majority are Exchange Act section 36(a)(1) orders about market plumbing: Consolidated Audit Trail timestamps and port-level settings, Regulation NMS Rules 605, 610 and 612, Rule 10c-1a securities lending, Rule 13f-2 and Form SHO, clearing-agency Rule 17ad-22 conditions, and overnight trading by 24X National Exchange. Those reduce burdens on exchanges and broker-dealers, not on issuers, so they are context rather than delivery of this ask.
  • Two orders that do reach issuers’ side of the market, beyond the multi-class ETF relief cited above: the order granting directors and officers of certain foreign private issuers an exemption from the Section 16(a) filing requirements (2026-03-10, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/10/2026-04613/order-granting-directors-and-officers-of-certain-foreign-private-issuers-an-exemption-from-the), extended to additional persons on 2026-05-22. They are narrow and are not cited as Evidence.
  • sec.gov is not a wall (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). It refuses a bare curl and a browser User-Agent, which is what three passes measured, and answers 200 with full content to the full Chrome header set — the third rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs. The Commission’s speeches-and-statements index at sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements pages with ?year=&page= and was enumerated for 2025 and 2026: 350 distinct statements, from which the 2025-07-31 Project Crypto speech now cited was taken. sec.gov/rules-regulations/policy-statements is the complete policy-statement list and was read in full.
  • Scan triage 2026-09-24: one more order of the market-plumbing kind. On 2026-09-15 the Commission granted exemptive relief under Exchange Act section 36(a)(1) from the Inline XBRL requirements for portions of Form CA-1 and Form 1, and for Form X-17A-5 Part III, Form 17-H and a security-based swap entity’s annual compliance report (Release No. 34-106339, FR 2026-18905, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/15/2026-18905/order-granting-exemptive-relief-pursuant-to-section-36a1-of-the-securities-exchange-act-of-1934-from). Every form it names is filed by a clearing agency, an exchange, a broker-dealer or a swap entity — Form CA-1 and Form 1 are registration forms for those intermediaries, X-17A-5 is the broker-dealer annual report — so it falls squarely in the class this item’s note above already calls context rather than delivery: relief for market plumbing, not for issuers and not for smaller entrepreneurs. No event, rung unchanged at partial. The scan report proposed this record against #2124 (fundamentally reform the securities laws), which it does not reach: a filing-format exemption is not a scaled disclosure regime. It belongs here, and it is here as a note.
  • Why the Chairman’s speech is attempted and does not lift the item to done. It is an intent, not a use, and it sits below the orders already cited rather than above them. The ask measures a rate of use for the benefit of issuers and especially smaller entrepreneurs; what the record shows is heavy use for market plumbing, one order for fund complexes, two narrow foreign-private-issuer orders, and a proposal for crypto-asset issuers. The limb the Quote emphasizes is still proposed.
Action
expand
Object
the SEC's general exemptive authority
ID
2129