Gary Gensler Could Go Down as Worst SEC Chair in History: Tom Emmer’s Scathing Verdict

SEC Chair Gary Gensler faces mounting criticism as House Majority Whip Tom Emmer delivers a brutal assessment of his tenure—accusing him of stifling innovation while failing to protect investors.

Regulatory Overreach Backfires

Gensler's aggressive enforcement approach creates chaos instead of clarity. Industry leaders argue his campaign against crypto projects ignores real fraud while punishing legitimate builders. The compliance costs skyrocket—startups spend more on lawyers than product development.

Market Consequences Mount

American crypto firms flee overseas as regulatory uncertainty strangles domestic innovation. Trading volumes plummet on US exchanges while offshore platforms hit record numbers. Retail investors get left holding the bag—again.

Legacy in Jeopardy

History remembers regulators who balanced protection with progress. Gensler's legacy risks becoming a cautionary tale about how heavy-handed bureaucracy can crush an entire industry—while Wall Street insiders keep playing their usual games with impunity.

Missing Message Scandal

The SEC watchdog revealed that the IT department mistakenly wiped Gensler’s messages, erasing records tied to crypto enforcement actions and transparency. The data loss was exacerbated by poor change management, inadequate backups, ignored system alerts, and unaddressed vendor software flaws, it stated.

Around 1,500 messages from colleagues and other records were recovered, and around 38% of them concerned critical SEC action and conversations about suing digital asset platforms during the Biden administration’s war on crypto. Emmer said it was “just more fuel for the fire that he was running his own show.”

“I WOULD argue that he was less than honest all the way through and this, this just smells. It smells when they talked about wanting to have a transparent, open-door policy. There’s nothing transparent about what that guy was doing.”

Emmer concluded that the TRUMP administration is undoing “all of this garbage that we dealt with for the last four years.”

This is just another example of less-than-honest behavior by the Biden administration, and in this particular case, “one of the worst bureaucrats that I’ve ever dealt with,” he said.

Double Standards at the SEC

At the same time the messages went missing – between October 2022 and September 2023 – the SEC cracked down on the use of messaging apps by banks and financial institutions.

Several prominent investment banking and financial institutions, including Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS Securities, and Cantor Fitzgerald, were charged with violating record-keeping and books-and-records laws under the Securities and Exchange Act.

“Finance, ultimately, depends on trust. By failing to honor their recordkeeping and books-and-records obligations, the market participants we have charged today have failed to maintain that trust,” Gensler said at the time.