The Securities and Exchange Commission’s top enforcement official has stepped down after half a year on the job.
Judge Margaret Ryan, who started as director of the SEC’s division of enforcement on Sept. 2, has resigned, effective Monday. Sam Waldon, who was acting director of the division before Ryan started, is stepping back into the role on an acting basis again, the SEC said in a Monday news release.
Despite Ryan’s relatively short tenure at the agency, SEC officials credited her with a “critical course correction within the division.” Under her tenure, the agency returned “its focus to prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity rather than technical rule violations with no charges alleging investor harm,” the SEC’s news release said.
Commission officials said that Ryan moved staff “toward the types of misconduct that inflict the greatest harm, such as fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust, and away from approaches that prioritized touting volume over impact.”
And indeed, in a speech to the Los Angeles County Bar Association last month, Ryan said she was “far more concerned with the quality and impact of the enforcement actions that we bring than with chasing numbers.”
Ryan’s tenure at the SEC has been marked by a notable downturn in enforcement actions, even compared to the agency’s work under President Donald Trump’s first term. But it’s also worth noting that slowdowns during presidential transitions are not uncommon, Reuters reported this week.
Before she came to the SEC, Ryan served as a senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Services. In Monday’s release and in her own words last month, Ryan said she did not seek the chief enforcement role at the SEC: “Rather, it found me,” she said.
The role has, in the past, typically been held for years, The New York Times reported Monday. Gurbir Singh Grewal, who helmed the enforcement division under the Biden administration, served for just over three years, for instance. Stephanie Avakian, who co-led the division with Steven Peikin under Trump’s first term, also served for four years.
In her speech before the L.A. bar association on Feb. 11, Ryan acknowledged her relatively short tenure at the agency. “I haven’t been leading the Division long, but I’ve been here long enough to see and admire the deep technical expertise held by both the Commission staff and the securities bar, developed and nurtured over the last ninety-plus years,” she told the group.
