President Donald Trump has nominated four people to fill vacant seats at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The White House announced the nominations on Thursday: Nathan Anonick and Matthew Rowland for the CFTC, and Kristin Johnson and Steven Levine for the SEC.
Each nomination requires Senate confirmation. The slate pairs a Republican and a Democrat at each agency, with Anonick and Levine as Republicans and Rowland and Johnson as Democrats. This marks the first time the administration has put forward Democratic nominees for either commission.
The appointments address significant staffing shortages at both agencies. The CFTC has operated with minimal staffing, with Michael Selig as its lone Senate-confirmed member following a wave of departures. Both commissions have nonetheless pursued active crypto regulatory agendas in recent months.
Both CFTC nominees have backgrounds in legislative work on crypto policy. Anonick, a Republican, serves as legislative counsel to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman and was a lead negotiator on the committee's portion of the Clarity Act, a 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 background includes a focus on enforcement and customer protections.
On the SEC side, Levine would fill the seat of Hester Peirce, the agency's most prominent crypto advocate and head of its Crypto Task Force. His own public positions on digital assets are not well established. Johnson, a former CFTC commissioner, would take the seat of Caroline Crenshaw, a frequent crypto skeptic. At the CFTC, Johnson focused on digital-asset custody and decentralized finance while pressing for stronger customer protections.
The nominations follow the collapse of the Clarity Act, which would have established market-structure rules for crypto. After the legislation failed to advance, the SEC and CFTC moved to fill the regulatory vacuum with their own authority. The CFTC has cleared perpetual futures on individual stocks, proposed bringing crypto exchanges under federal oversight, and moved to define event contracts as swaps. The SEC has rolled out an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks, proposed rules for investment advisers to custody crypto, and issued guidance suggesting most crypto assets are not securities.
The confirmation window is constrained. With the Senate heading toward Democratic control in January, Republicans have limited time during the lame-duck period to advance the nominations before the political balance shifts.
