Representative French Hill, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, said regulatory actions by the SEC and CFTC on digital assets "fall short" of the legislative solution Congress failed to deliver when the Senate rejected the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act last month.

Speaking in a Wednesday interview with Fox Business, the Arkansas Republican argued that rulemaking by the two agencies cannot substitute for statute. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have proposed rulemakings covering oversight and enforcement of crypto markets since the CLARITY vote failed. Hill said those steps lack the durability of a law passed by Congress.

"I still have hope [...] that we can get [CLARITY] passed in the lame duck session of Congress," Hill said. "We need that permanent law change to make sure America is number one in digital assets and blockchain technology."

Why does Hill want a law rather than agency rules?

The core issue is permanence. Agency rules can be revised or withdrawn by future commissions; legislation creates a stable market-structure framework that firms can build compliance and business plans around. Hill's comments came after SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig announced plans to advance crypto regulation at the direction of President Donald Trump. Both agencies are filling the gap left by the Senate's failure to pass the CLARITY Act, which would have codified the division of regulatory authority between the two regulators over digital assets.

How much time does Congress have?

Very little. As Hill noted, the Senate has only 22 days in session between the US midterm elections in November and the start of the new Congress in 2027. The lame-duck dynamic cuts both ways: lawmakers who lost their seats or are retiring may vote without electoral pressure, while the post-election composition of the chamber could shift the vote count in either direction.

The timing question is compounded by leadership vacancies at both regulators.

• Seven seats are empty across the SEC and CFTC leadership as of Wednesday.
• Commissioner Hester Peirce announced her resignation from the SEC last week, leaving Chair Atkins and Mark Uyeda as the only remaining commissioners.
• Selig serves as the CFTC's chair and its sole commissioner.

What happens if CLARITY fails again?

If the lame-duck session passes without a vote, the bill would need to be reintroduced in the next Congress and start the legislative process over, with a new committee landscape determined by the midterm results. In the interim, market-structure policy defaults to the SEC and CFTC rulemaking tracks — the approach Hill explicitly characterized as insufficient for long-term regulatory certainty.

The practical stakes for crypto firms operating in the US are jurisdictional clarity: which tokens and trading activities fall under the SEC's securities regime versus the CFTC's commodities framework. Until Congress resolves that boundary in statute, firms must track parallel rulemakings from two understaffed agencies.

The 22-day lame-duck window after the November midterms now stands as the last realistic opportunity for the current Congress to send the CLARITY Act to the president's desk before market-structure policy resets in 2027.