SEC names new director of enforcement

The SEC has a new top cop.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has named lawyer David Woodcock director of its Division of Enforcement, it said in a statement.

Woodcock, a partner and chair of the securities enforcement practice group at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, will be a familiar face at the SEC: He was director of its Fort Worth regional office from 2011 to 2015, and was chair of its financial reporting and audit task force.

Woodcock’s tenure begins on May 4. He replaces Margaret Ryan, who left the role abruptly in March after just six months on the job. Ryan, a former military judge, did not give a reason for her departure, but sources told Reuters she had clashed with SEC leadership over how aggressively to enforce cases, including those involving members of President Donald Trump’s circle.

Recent SEC communications hint that SEC Chair Paul Atkins will expect Woodcock to concentrate on fraud and other garden-variety financial crimes. In a recent report on FY 2025 enforcement actions, the SEC took several swipes at former Chair Gary Gensler’s approach to enforcement. The report stated that FY 2025 “was characterized by an unprecedented rush to bring a significant number of cases in advance of the presidential inauguration and the aggressive pursuit of novel legal theories.” (In regulator-world, that counts as serious shade.)

Quoted in the report, Atkins couched his stance toward enforcement as corrective, noting that the SEC has now “redirected resources toward the types of misconduct that inflict the greatest harm—particularly fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust.”

That may, in reality, come down to less scrutiny for Wall Street. In FY 2025, which ended in September 2025, the SEC undertook 30% fewer actions against public companies than it did in FY 2024, a study by Cornerstone Research found. And the vast majority of those actions—93%—were filed while Gensler was still chair. Monetary settlements also dropped by 45% year over year in 2025; at $808 million, they were the lowest since 2012, according to the study.

Woodcock’s enforcement division also likely won’t be going after crypto firms that aggressively, if the SEC’s recent track record is anything to go by. In spring 2025 the agency dismissed suits and investigations against crypto giants Binance, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken. The agency “eased up on more than 60% of the crypto cases” in progress when Trump’s second term began, according to the New York Times.