Representative Maxine Waters has formally pressed for a House Financial Services Committee oversight hearing into what she describes as the SEC’s recent pullback from crypto enforcement. In a letter dated around December 29–30, 2025 to Chairman French Hill, she argues the shift weakens investor protections and demands direct accountability from SEC Chairman Paul Atkins.
Waters’ request points to a sharp change in posture: she cites figures suggesting the SEC has dropped cases or materially reduced penalties in more than 60% of its active crypto matters since the start of the Trump administration. The letter frames the impact as broad, naming high-profile situations involving Ripple, Coinbase, Binance, Crypto.com, Kraken, Consensys, and Justin Sun.
What Waters is asking Congress to do
Waters wants the committee to use oversight as a forcing function. She is asking that Chairman Paul Atkins appear before the House Financial Services Committee to explain why cases were dismissed or pared back and to outline the SEC’s revised enforcement priorities. In her view, the moves are “rapid, significant, and questionable,” and she is seeking clarity on how the SEC intends to protect market integrity and investor safety under this reset.
She is also positioning the hearing as a governance check on decision-making. An oversight hearing is being presented as the mechanism to surface facts, test the SEC’s rationale, and establish whether the new approach introduces avoidable gaps in guardrails. The immediate objective is less about rhetoric and more about forcing a clear, on-the-record explanation of enforcement triage and prioritization.
Political influence and the investor-protection debate
The request lands in a polarized narrative about what enforcement should look like. Critics have raised conflict-of-interest concerns, arguing that some decisions may intersect with firms perceived as linked to the administration, while defenders frame the same shift as a policy reset aimed at accelerating innovation and making the U.S. a crypto hub. That tension matters operationally because it changes how regulated entities and counterparties price regulatory and litigation risk.
Waters is tying the enforcement rollback to a wider political accountability push. She has advanced the Stop TRUMP in Crypto Act, a proposal intended to bar sitting and former national political figures—and their immediate family members—from participating in cryptocurrency ventures. Separately, she has sharply criticized the pardon of Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, describing it as endorsing “crypto crime” and enabling operations “with virtually no guardrails.”
Waters’ push puts the SEC’s crypto policy pivot under immediate congressional scrutiny, and the outcome will shape how market participants assess compliance expectations and enforcement risk going forward.
