SEC enforcement actions against public companies dropped 30% in 2025

Well, that’s one interpretation of hands-off leadership.

Amid a shift in Securities and Exchange Commission leadership, the agency took 56 enforcement actions against public companies in fiscal 2025, a 30% drop from fiscal 2024, according to an analysis of SEC enforcement activity from Cornerstone Research and the NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business.

The report covered SEC data up to November 14, 2025.

Declines in enforcement activity are “consistent with the general pattern for other fiscal years when the SEC administration changed,” the report’s authors noted. What’s more notable, however, is when these enforcement actions occurred, given the leadership turnover.

More than nine in 10 (93%) of the enforcement actions taken in fiscal 2025 occurred before former SEC Chair Gary Gensler stepped down on January 20. Once acting Chair Mark Uyeda and Chair Paul Atkins took over later in the year, only four enforcement actions were taken, marking “the lowest number of actions initiated by a new SEC administration during its first fiscal year since at least FY 2013,” the report said.

Another way to slice the numbers: 35 actions were initiated in September 2024, the last month of the SEC’s fiscal year, and in September 2025, only one action was initiated. That’s “a stark difference” from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2024 “under Chair Gensler when 34%–44% of total actions in a fiscal year were initiated in the last month of the fiscal year,” per the report.

“We’ve historically seen declines in enforcement activity during SEC leadership transitions, and FY 2025 aligned with those patterns,” Sara Gilley, a report coauthor and cohead of Cornerstone’s securities litigation practice, said in a statement. “Even within that overall decline, the year stood out for its record highs and lows and the unusually low monetary settlements observed.”

Monetary settlements totaled $808 million in fiscal 2025, the lowest since fiscal 2012, according to the report.

Back in February, we asked securities experts what they expected to see from Atkins’s tenure at the SEC, and this is more or less what they anticipated. “My expectation is that there probably will be a foot taken off the pedal,” Lisa Bragança, a former SEC branch chief who now leads a securities defense law firm, told us in February.