Recapping a head-spinning year of regulatory and policy shifts under Trump

The Trump administration wasted no time attacking the regulatory state this year. Republicans also managed to pass massive, consequential tax legislation.

This sea change of regulatory and policy reforms has big consequences for CFOs and their organizations. Here’s how this all unfolded this year.

Chill pill: Businesses faced less scrutiny from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission this year compared to during the Biden administration. For instance, SEC enforcement actions against public companies dipped by 30% this year from 2024, as CFO Brew previously reported.

Kevin Desai, US and Mexico deals leader at PwC, told us that the FTC has loosened its antitrust stance under Trump relative to Biden. He called that a “tailwind” for the M&A market.

The crypto industry in particular enjoyed a significant rollback in scrutiny. Under new Chair Paul Atkins, the SEC this year halted investigations into crypto exchanges Robinhood and Coinbase, and dropped a lawsuit against another crypto exchange, Kraken. The SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission also announced that they’re working to align regulatory frameworks on topics involving crypto and other sectors.

Atkins recently told an audience of alternative asset managers that he wants to shield his regulatory work from being reversed in future administrations. “We can’t have a ping-ponging back and forth,” he said at an event hosted by the Managed Funds Association.

Not all deregulatory attempts succeeded this year. Republican lawmakers tried to kill the PCAOB this summer, but the Senate parliamentarian spared the agency.

The big bill: The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” aka OBBBA, aka OB3, was the GOP’s signature tax reform bill, and it was stuffed with business-friendly provisions. Major pieces included extension of certain 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) provisions, such as 100% bonus depreciation. Another provision allowed companies to again immediately expense all domestic R&D costs, which eliminated a TCJA requirement that R&D expenses be amortized over five years.

Anyone home? But as Jennifer Acuña, co-lead at the federal legislative and regulatory services group of KPMG’s Washington national tax practice, explained to us in November, OB3 wasn’t technically finished once it passed. As with any major legislation, it’s up to the agencies to write regulatory guidance. In the case of OB3, that’s the IRS.

The beleaguered tax agency already had a lot going on this year even before it was tasked with writing guidance for the massive law, ahead of next year’s tax season. The 43-day government shutdown put a temporary stop to much of the agency’s work, but the IRS prioritized OB3 guidance during that period.

It laid off about a quarter of its workforce earlier in the year, and shed another 1,400 workers on top of that about a month ago.

Agency observers are concerned what the layoffs will mean for next year’s busy season. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an IRS watchdog, noted in a recent report that the agency “is beginning to see the effects of the workforce reduction on post-filing season activities, and we are concerned how this will impact the 2026 filing season.”

“I’m really worried about this filing season coming up,” James Creech, a principal in Baker Tilly’s specialty tax practice, told us. Creech said preparing for the tax season is a “Herculean effort” by IRS professionals that starts months in advance. He’s worried that systems will become brittle if the agency is behind on preparations.

“If we get close to 3/15 [the first major filing deadline of the year] and the system just isn’t working right, we may not know the full extent of the brittleness until we’re absolutely at the last minute,” Creech said. “My fear would be that there’s kind of a series of cascading failures without the kind of proper IT infrastructure, without the proper workforce, that we may not know that we got to that point until it’s too late.”

Now for a slight tangent: Upheaval at other federal agencies also impacted CFOs by curtailing or outright stopping the release of key economic data. While this doesn’t fall under the bucket of regulatory change, per se, the absence of data impacts organizations’ ability to forecast and plan, according to experts who spoke with CFO Brew.

First, Trump abruptly fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner after the agency released jobs data that he didn’t like. The BLS then didn’t release most of its data during the federal government shutdown.

Experts warned the move could damage the integrity of federal economic data. But BLS wasn’t the only agency undergoing change. The Trump administration has also halted some of its weather and climate data programs, which experts told us isn’t available anywhere else.