It is already well understood that there has been a change in direction at the SEC under the current Trump Administration and SEC Chair Paul Atkins. In a speech earlier this week at the New York Stock Exchange entitled “Revitalizing America’s Markets at 250,” Atkins described the ways in which he thought the agency in recent times has lost its direction, particularly with respect to its public company disclosure requirements. With the stated aim of restoring its original mission, Atkins identified two main public company disclosure reform goals for the agency. He also set out “three pillars” to “make IPOs great again.” Atkins’s IPO-related remarks include brief but noteworthy comments about securities class action litigation reform that have largely been overlooked in the press coverage of his speech.

A copy of Atkins’s December 2, 2025, speech can be found here. Atkins’s December 3, 2025, Wall Street Journal op-ed summarizing his NYSE speech remarks can be found here.  

Atkins’s speech title invoked both the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and his goals at the SEC to “revitalize” the agency, primarily through regulatory reform. His opening comments summoned the principles of individualism and entrepreneurialism that in his view embody the country’s bedrock principles and also invoked the strength of America’s capital markets as a key component of the country’s historical success. He also stressed the principles behind the establishment of the SEC itself. But, he warned, “in recent years, our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States to once stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies.”

In his retelling of the history of the SEC since its founding, Atkins expressed the view that the agency’s original mission has been compromised as “rules have multiplied faster than the problems they were intended to solve.” What has happened is “a cautionary tale of regulatory creep,” which has resulted in companies being overburdened with disclosure requirements that have “eroded American competitiveness.” Three decades of “accretive rulemaking have produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate.”

By way of illustration of this regulatory overkill, Atkins cites the SEC’s current rules on executive compensation (while expressly referring to a recent letter from Warren Buffett to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders critical of the disclosure rules). Atkins noted that earlier this year the SEC had brought together representatives from a variety of constituencies to discuss the agency’s executive compensation disclosure requirements. Atkins reported that “somewhat to my surprise” the participants universally agreed that “the length and complexity of executive compensation disclosure” have “limited its usefulness and insight to investors.”

Accordingly, Atkins said in his speech, that one of his priorities as SEC Chair is to reform the SEC’s disclosure rules, with two goals in mind: “First, the SEC must root its disclosure requirements in the concept of financial materiality. Second, these requirements must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”

With respect to keying the disclosure requirements to materiality concepts, Atkins noted that “to avoid information overload to investors, our disclosure regime is most effective when the SEC provides, as FDR advocated, the minimum effective dose of regulation needed to elicit the information that is material investors and we allow market forces to drive the disclosures of any additional aspects of their operations that may be beneficial to investors.” When the SEC’s disclosure regime “has been hijacked to require information that is unmoored from reality, investors do not benefit.”  The executive compensation roundtable to which Atkins referred in his speech represents “one of the first steps” toward the execution of his goal of “ensuring that materiality is the north star of the SEC’s disclosure regime.”

Atkins’s other priority with respect to reforming SEC disclosure requirements is “to scale the requirements with the company’s size and maturity as a public company.” Atkins cited several past occasions in which the SEC and Congress had scaled disclosure requirements to company size, adding that it is “time to revisit these concepts that have proven effective and merit expansion.” It should, Atkins said, no longer be the case that smaller companies labor under the same requirements as much larger and better resourced companies. “We need,” Atkins said, “disclosure that is calibrated for a company’s size and maturity; that is driven by market demands; and to the extent mandated by the SEC, this is rooted in materiality and not whimsical social or political agendas.”

The proposed public company disclosure reform agenda is, Atkins added, “just one of three pillars of my plan to make IPOs great again.” A second pillar involves “de-politicizing shareholder meetings and returning their focus to director elections and significant corporate matters.” The third pillar is that “we must also reform the litigation landscape for securities lawsuits to eliminate frivolous complaints, while maintaining an avenue for shareholders to continue to bring forth meritorious claims.” Atkins said that the SEC has “been hard at work on executing this plan, and we look forward to the progress that is taking shape.”

Discussion

Readers wondering what public company disclosure reform might look like may want to consider Atkins’s September 2025 proposal, discussed at length here, to eliminate public company quarterly reporting requirements.

Readers may also recall that in prior public comments Atkins has previously referred to “making IPOs great again.” Atkins used those precise words in connection with the SEC’s September 2025 announcement that it was changing its policy with respect to prospective IPO companies’ inclusion of mandatory arbitration provisions in its corporate bylaws (as discussed at length here).

The SEC’s change in its policy with respect to mandatory arbitration provisions in prospective IPO companies’ bylaws arguably represents a notable first step by the agency toward Atkins’s third pillar of “reforming the litigation landscape for securities lawsuits.” Atkins’s remark that the agency is hard at work seeking to “execute” on the three pillars of his plan suggest that there could be further developments ahead in which the agency seeks to alter the securities litigation “landscape.”

With respect to Atkins’s proposal to differentiate disclosure requirements between smaller and larger companies, Atkins’s speech provides little detail about what that might look like or how the requirements might differ, nor does it provide a suggestion of what size differences would entail different requirements. I suspect we will hear more details about this disclosure proposition in the weeks and months ahead (my guess is it will be sooner rather than later).

It is of course not news that the SEC under the current Trump Administration will be taking a different approach to public company disclosure requirements than was taking by the agency under Atkins’s predecessor, Gary Gensler. Indeed, in March of this year, and even before Atkins took office, the agency under interim Chair Mark Uyeda voted end its defense of the agency’s Climate Change Disclosure guidelines, which had been put in place under Gensler, during the Biden administration.

Atkins’s stated mission to combat burdensome public company disclosure requirements also raises the question about other Gensler-era disclosure regimes. For example, what does Atkins’s disclosure reform agenda mean for the Cybersecurity and Incident Disclosure requirements that were implemented by the agency under Gensler? Will the SEC target those disclosure requirements as well?

And Speaking of the SEC: A December 2, 2025, item in the New York Times Dealbook column notes that on January 3, 2026, the SEC will lose its sole remaining Democratic commissioner, as Democratic Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw’s term comes to an end. Crenshaw’s departure will leave the nominally non-partisan agency without a Democratic Commissioner, but instead with a 3-0 Republican majority. The Dealbook columns suggests that President Trump is unlikely to appoint another Democratic commissioner. “Who will watch the watchdog?” a commentator in the Dealbook column asks.

I note that in his speech Atkins emphasized the need for the agency to return to its original mission and purposes. If that really is his concern, he will undoubtedly be alarmed to find that the agency that was from its inception conceived of as non-partisan will soon become unrelievedly partisan, contrary to the intent of Congress and, with only a few brief exceptions, to the agency’s lengthy history.