Trump’s First Democratic Picks for SEC and CFTC Could Reshape Crypto’s Regulators

By Decrypt Staff

President Donald Trump has nominated four people to fill vacant seats at the two federal agencies writing the rules for crypto, in a bipartisan slate that could reshape the commissions that have increasingly taken the lead on digital-asset policy after Congress stalled.

The White House said Thursday it sent the nominations to the Senate: Nathan Anonick and Matthew Rowland for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Kristin Johnson and Steven Levine for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Each requires Senate confirmation. Notably, the slate pairs a Republican and a Democrat at each agency, with Anonick and Levine the Republicans and Rowland and Johnson the Democrats, marking the first time the administration has put forward Democratic nominees for either commission.

The appointments matter because of how depleted both agencies have become. The CFTC in particular has been running on a skeleton crew, operating with Michael Selig as its lone Senate-confirmed member after a wave of departures, even as it has pursued one of the most aggressive crypto agendas in its history.

Filling those seats would give the commissions the quorum and staying power to turn proposals into durable rules.

Both CFTC nominees come from the Senate Agriculture Committee, which shares jurisdiction over crypto market structure and will vet their nominations. Anonick, a Republican, is legislative counsel to committee Chairman John Boozman and was a lead negotiator on the panel’s portion of the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill that collapsed in the Senate this fall.

Rowland, a Democrat, is a career CFTC attorney detailed to the committee who also worked on the Clarity Act and an earlier 2024 crypto bill. His enforcement-heavy background and party lean could introduce a dissenting voice to a commission that, under Selig, has leaned firmly pro-industry.

On the SEC side, which the Senate Banking Committee will review, the picks would replace two commissioners central to crypto policy in opposite ways. Levine, a Republican, is slated to fill the seat of Hester Peirce, the agency’s most prominent crypto advocate and the head of its Crypto Task Force.

Levine’s own views on digital assets are not well established publicly, making his future votes a key variable for whether the SEC’s crypto-friendly push holds.

Johnson, a Democrat and former CFTC commissioner, would take the seat of frequent crypto skeptic Caroline Crenshaw; at the CFTC she focused on digital-asset custody and DeFi and pressed for stronger customer protections and conflict-of-interest rules.

The timing underscores a shift following the collapse of the Clarity Act, the crypto industry’s marquee market structure bill that would have established more-favorable-than-not rules for most of crypto.

After the legislation failed to advance in the Senate, the SEC and CFTC moved to fill the vacuum with their own authority, leaving the industry to get its “clarity” from regulators rather than legislators. A fully staffed pair of commissions would cement that dynamic.

Those agency efforts have been sweeping: The CFTC has cleared perpetual futures on individual stocks, floated bringing crypto exchanges under federal oversight, and moved to define event contracts as “swaps.” The SEC, meanwhile, rolled out an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, proposed rules letting investment advisers custody crypto, and issued guidance suggesting most crypto assets aren’t securities.

The nominations are the first Trump has sent for these seats in roughly a year, a gap that reflected turbulence around crypto appointments. The administration previously pulled its CFTC chair nominee, Brian Quintenz, amid a clash involving the Winklevoss twins.

The confirmation window is now tight: with the Senate heading toward Democratic control in January, Republicans have only a short lame-duck stretch to move the slate before the calculus changes.

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