Trump Nominates Four to CFTC and SEC, Including First Democrats

President Donald Trump sent four nominations to the Senate on Thursday to fill vacant seats at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the White House. The slate names Nathan Anonick and Matthew Rowland for the CFTC and Kristin Johnson and Steven Levine for the SEC, and it marks the first time the administration has put forward Democratic nominees for either commission.

The pairing is strictly bipartisan: one Republican and one Democrat per agency. Anonick and Levine are the Republicans; Rowland and Johnson are the Democrats. Each nomination requires Senate confirmation, and the timing is tight — Republicans hold only a short lame-duck stretch before the Senate shifts toward Democratic control in January, which changes the confirmation calculus entirely.

Why the commissions are running short-handed

The nominations matter largely because both agencies have thinned out. The CFTC has operated with Michael Selig as its lone Senate-confirmed member after a wave of departures, even as it pursued one of the most aggressive crypto agendas in its history. Filling the empty seats would restore the quorum and staying power needed to turn proposals into durable rules.

Trump has not sent nominees for these seats in roughly a year, a gap that reflected turbulence around crypto appointments. The administration previously withdrew its CFTC chair nominee, Brian Quintenz, amid a clash involving the Winklevoss twins.

Who are the CFTC picks?

Both CFTC nominees come from the Senate Agriculture Committee, which shares jurisdiction over crypto market structure and will vet their nominations.

• Nathan Anonick (R): Legislative counsel to committee Chairman John Boozman and a lead negotiator on the panel's portion of the Clarity Act, the market-structure bill that collapsed in the Senate this fall.
• Matthew Rowland (D): 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.

What changes at the SEC?

The Senate Banking Committee will review the SEC picks, who would replace two commissioners central to crypto policy in opposite ways.

• Steven Levine (R) is slated to fill the seat of Hester Peirce, the agency's most prominent crypto advocate and head of its Crypto Task Force. Levine's 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.
• Kristin Johnson (D), a 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.

Does this cement the regulators' role over crypto policy?

The slate arrives after the Clarity Act — the industry's marquee market-structure bill, which would have established more-favorable-than-not rules for most of crypto — failed to advance in the Senate this fall. The SEC and CFTC then moved to fill the vacuum with their own authority, leaving the industry to get its "clarity" from regulators rather than legislators. Fully staffed commissions would cement that dynamic.

Those agency efforts have already been sweeping:

• The CFTC cleared perpetual futures on individual stocks, floated bringing crypto exchanges under federal oversight, and moved to define event contracts as "swaps."
• The SEC 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.

If the Senate does not confirm the four nominees before January, a Democratic-controlled chamber inherits the slate and the pace of confirmation — and the direction of the two commissions' crypto agendas — becomes far less predictable.