A United States lawmaker wants to strip the Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler of his salary by paying him just $1 per year.
In a proposed amendment to the Financial Services and General Government (FSGG), Rep. Tim Burchett suggested that Gensler’s salary be brought down to $1, as part of wider proposal to defund the regulator.
First introduced on July 13 this year, the FSGG bill is a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to significantly reduce government spending across the board.
Rep. Burchett’s proposed amendment to the FSGG bill. Source: House Committee on Appropriations
It’s estimated that Gensler earns north of $300,000 per year for his duties as head of the SEC.
Burchett wasn’t the only lawmaker taking aim at the SEC, with the overall bill aimed at drastically cutting funding to government agencies.
While introducing the bill to the House Rules Committee on Nov. 6, Rep. Steve Womack outlined that the SEC, among other government agencies, had fallen prey to regulatory overreach and were becoming an undue financial burden on the government.
Womack said that the best course of action would be to defund the SEC, to help limit its regulatory “intrusiveness” while forcing the regulator to return focus to its core mission.
“Specifically, we turn off rulemakings at the Securities and Exchange Commission that lack proper cost-benefit analysis and aggregate impact analysis.”
“To be clear, the agencies under our jurisdiction perform important functions; however, many have strayed from their mandate and the results have been a true disservice to the American people,” Womack added.
We are on an unsustainable trajectory.
My bill reins in wasteful Washington spending to address our dire fiscal situation. https://t.co/lWgyvHknQQ
This isn’t the first time that Gensler and his agency have come under fire from U.S. politicians.
On June 12, United States Reps. Warren Davidson and Tom Emmer introduced the SEC Stabilization Act to the House of Representatives, with one of the bill’s primary provisions being one that would remove Gary Gensler as chair of the SEC.
If passed, the bill would fire Gensler and redistribute the power of the agency between the SEC chair and commissioners. It would also create an executive director position and add a sixth commissioner to the agency to prevent any one political party from holding a majority sway.
Davidson and Emmer have long been vocal critics of the Gensler-led SEC, with Emmer calling the SEC Chair a “bad faith regulator” and accusing him of “blindly spraying the crypto community with enforcement actions while completely missing the truly bad actors.”
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.