WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, once 1,300 lawyers and accountants charged with policing the world’s largest capital markets, has been reduced under the latest round of federal workforce cuts to two employees, both of whom are reportedly using accrued PTO this week to interview at Goldman Sachs.
The lone remaining presence in the agency’s Washington headquarters, sources confirmed, is an unpaid Georgetown junior named Tyler who has been forwarding tip-line emails into a Gmail folder labeled ‘deal with after finals’ and politely declining to open any attachment over 4 megabytes.
‘We’ve right-sized enforcement to reflect a more dynamic, founder-friendly market posture,’ said acting SEC chair Dale Pruitt, who clarified that going forward the agency would ‘trust but verify’ compliance by occasionally reading the LinkedIn posts of public-company CEOs. ‘If something is genuinely fraudulent, we feel confident that, eventually, a podcaster will mention it.’
The reductions, finalized Tuesday, eliminate the divisions responsible for insider trading, accounting fraud, market manipulation, and crypto, the latter of which Pruitt described as ‘less a category of enforcement than a category of personal hobby.’ Whistleblower submissions, previously routed through a secure intake portal, will now be redirected to a Google Form that requires the tipster to first identify all images containing a traffic light.
Wall Street’s response has been swift and largely celebratory. Citadel’s compliance department reportedly disbanded itself Wednesday out of professional embarrassment. A memecoin launched at 2:14 p.m. Eastern called $UNREGD hit a $610 million market cap before the developer rugged it ninety minutes later, an event one trader described as ‘the new IPO process, but honest about it.’
A White House spokesman defended the cuts, noting that the SEC’s most recent successful enforcement action was against a retiree in Boca Raton who had been operating a Ponzi scheme out of a Panera and could not afford counsel. ‘Real fraud,’ the spokesman said, ‘is when federal employees have desks.’
Internally, the two remaining enforcement attorneys have left autoresponders indicating they will return calls ‘on or around the heat death of the agency.’ One has updated her LinkedIn headline to ‘Open to Work / Open to Defending the People I Used to Investigate.’ The other has already accepted a position structuring synthetic CDOs at a firm that, as recently as January, was the subject of an open SEC inquiry now marked ‘closed — vibes.’
At press time, the agency’s general enforcement inbox had begun bouncing incoming mail with the message ‘mailbox full,’ which a Treasury official clarified was, technically, the new policy.