President Donald Trump has nominated four people to the two main US financial market regulators, including his first Democratic picks for either agency.
The White House sent the nominations to the Senate on Thursday, 12 November. Each agency gets one Republican and one Democrat.
The CFTC nominees
For the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Trump has nominated Republican Nathan Anonick and Democrat Matthew Rowland.
Anonick is legislative counsel to John Boozman, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and was a lead negotiator on the committee’s part of the CLARITY Act. Rowland is a career CFTC lawyer on secondment to the same committee. He worked on the CLARITY Act and an earlier crypto bill in 2024, and has a background in enforcement.
The CFTC has been running with a skeleton crew. Chairman Michael Selig is its only Senate-confirmed member after a wave of departures, so filling the seats would restore a quorum.
The SEC nominees
For the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Trump has nominated Republican Steven Levine and Democrat Kristin Johnson.
Levine would take the seat of Hester Peirce, the SEC’s most prominent supporter of crypto and the head of its Crypto Task Force. His views on digital assets are not well known publicly.
Johnson, a former CFTC commissioner, would replace Caroline Crenshaw, who has often been sceptical of crypto. At the CFTC, Johnson focused on crypto custody and decentralised finance, and pushed for stronger customer protections and conflict of interest rules.
A short window
Each nominee needs Senate approval. The CFTC picks will be vetted by the Senate Agriculture Committee and the SEC picks by the Senate Banking Committee.
Democrats are set to take control of the Senate in January, leaving Republicans a short window to move the nominations before then.
Regulators in the lead
The nominations matter because crypto policy is now being shaped mainly by regulators rather than Congress, after the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate this autumn.
Since then, the CFTC has cleared perpetual futures on individual stocks and moved to define event contracts as swaps. The SEC has created an “innovation exemption” for tokenised stocks, proposed rules allowing investment advisers to hold crypto for clients, and issued guidance suggesting most crypto assets are not securities.
What happens next
The Senate committees will hold hearings on the nominees. Whether they are confirmed before January, and how Levine and Johnson approach crypto at the SEC, will help decide whether the current friendly approach to crypto continues.
