The Senate Banking Committee will hear President Donald Trump’s two SEC commissioner nominees, Republican Steven Levine and Democrat Kristin N. Johnson, on Thursday 19 November, CoinDesk reported on 13 November. The committee added several nominations to a 19 November hearing on its calendar late on Thursday 12 November, the day the White House sent the names to the Senate together with two picks for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC): Republican Nathan Anonick and Democrat Matthew Rowland.
They are the first nominations to either agency in about a year, and the first Democrats Trump has put forward for them. If all four are confirmed, the SEC would go from two commissioners to four and the CFTC from one to three. Levine would take the seat Hester Peirce, the commissioner who ran the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, left in October.
The CFTC pair is moving more slowly. The Senate Agriculture Committee, which vets CFTC nominees, had not set a hearing date by Friday afternoon. A spokesperson for its chairman, John Boozman, told CoinDesk that he “welcomes these nominations and looks forward to holding a hearing soon”.
The clock matters because the Senate changes hands in January. Democrats won the chamber in the midterms, and, as we explained in our piece on Elizabeth Warren taking over Senate Banking, the Republican majority has only the lame-duck weeks left to confirm anyone on its own terms.
SEC commissioner nominees: who Levine and Johnson are
The White House notice of 12 November gives the seats and terms. Levine, of Maryland, is nominated for a term expiring on 5 June 2030, in place of “Hester Maria Peirce, term expired”. Johnson, of Michigan, is nominated for a term expiring on 5 June 2029, in the seat of Caroline A. Crenshaw, the last Democrat at the SEC, whose term also expired.
Levine’s record is the thinner of the two in public. The Block describes him as most recently general counsel and a senior adviser at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and earlier counsel and deputy chief of staff to SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda. CoinDesk instead calls him a senior lawyer at the Department of Labor. Neither outlet explains the gap, the White House notice gives no biography, and no official page published by Friday evening settles which job he left. The Uyeda link is on the record: an SEC release of 4 February 2025 lists Steven Levine as deputy chief of staff when Uyeda was acting chairman. Cointelegraph noted that his views on crypto regulation are not well established in public.
His time on Uyeda’s staff is the clearest clue to where he stands. Uyeda is one of only two sitting SEC commissioners today, with Chair Paul Atkins, and both are Republicans.
Johnson is a known quantity in crypto policy. She sat on the CFTC as a Democratic commissioner until 2025, where she spoke often about crypto custody, wallet.">decentralised finance and artificial intelligence, according to The Block. Cointelegraph recalls that she pushed for stronger customer protections and conflict-of-interest rules for crypto firms. CoinDesk says she now teaches at George Washington University Law School.
The two CFTC picks both worked on the CLARITY Act
Anonick, of Virginia, is nominated for a full CFTC term expiring on 19 June 2031, in the seat of former chair Rostin Behnam. The Block describes him as legislative counsel to Boozman and a lead negotiator on the Agriculture Committee’s part of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the market structure bill that would hand the CFTC oversight of spot trading in many tokens.
Rowland, of the District of Columbia, is nominated for the rest of a term that runs to 13 April 2028, in the seat Summer K. Mersinger left. He is a CFTC attorney detailed to the Agriculture Committee, where he worked on CLARITY and on the committee’s 2024 crypto bill, The Block reports. CoinDesk adds that he previously served on Johnson’s staff when she was a CFTC commissioner.
CoinDesk points out a pattern in the terms: in both agencies, the Democratic nominee gets the seat with the shorter time left.
| Nominee | Party | Agency | Seat (vice) | Term ends | Senate committee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steven Levine | Republican | SEC | Hester Peirce | 5 June 2030 | Banking (hearing 19 Nov) |
| Kristin N. Johnson | Democrat | SEC | Caroline Crenshaw | 5 June 2029 | Banking (hearing 19 Nov) |
| Nathan Anonick | Republican | CFTC | Rostin Behnam | 19 June 2031 | Agriculture (no date) |
| Matthew Rowland | Democrat | CFTC | Summer Mersinger | 13 April 2028 (remainder) | Agriculture (no date) |
Source for seats and terms: White House, Nominations Sent to the Senate, 12 November 2026. Hearing status: CoinDesk, 13 November.
A two-member SEC and a one-member CFTC
Both regulators have run for months with a fraction of their seats filled. The SEC has five seats and two commissioners, Atkins and Uyeda, both Republicans. The CFTC has five seats and one commissioner, Chairman Michael Selig. By law, no more than three members of either commission can come from the same party, a rule meant to keep a minority voice on each.
If the Senate confirms all four, the SEC would have three Republicans and one Democrat, with one seat still open, and the CFTC two Republicans and one Democrat, with two seats open. Neither agency would be full, but both would have a dissenting vote again and a quorum less exposed to one departure.
| Agency | Seats | Sitting today | If all four are confirmed |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC | 5 | 2 (Atkins, Uyeda; both Republican) | 4 (3 Republican, 1 Democrat) |
| CFTC | 5 | 1 (Selig, Republican) | 3 (2 Republican, 1 Democrat) |
Democrats had asked for this for months. In June, Senators Raphael Warnock and Chris Van Hollen sent a letter, signed by the Banking Committee’s Democrats, urging the White House to fill the minority seats at financial regulators. In July, according to The Block, the White House answered congressional leaders that it had asked Democrats for names and received none, and cited the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Slaughter case on the president’s power over independent agencies.
The CFTC’s situation has drawn the most attention because the agency could play a central role in overseeing digital assets if Congress passes CLARITY, as The Block noted in July. With one commissioner, every CFTC decision is Selig’s alone, including the 30-day ultimatum to prediction markets on state geoblocks we covered in our report on the CFTC order. On Friday the commission also sued Arkansas to defend its jurisdiction over prediction markets, a case we cover in our report on Louisiana’s suit against prediction markets.
Hester Peirce’s seat goes to a lawyer close to Uyeda
Peirce left the SEC on 2 October, about 16 months after her term formally expired in June 2025, under the rule that lets SEC commissioners stay on for a limited time after their term ends. She is joining Regent University School of Law as an associate professor. Since early 2025 she had led the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, the group behind much of the agency’s shift from enforcement cases toward guidance and rules for tokens, staking and tokenised securities.
In an interview with The Block before she left, she named protections for software developers and reform of financial surveillance as unfinished work, and said: “I’m still hopeful that Clarity could get passed.” She also played down the effect of her exit: “One commissioner’s departure doesn’t really matter.”
That makes Levine’s answers at the 19 November hearing, if it goes ahead as CoinDesk reported, the first public account of how Peirce’s successor sees tokens and custody. Johnson, by contrast, has years of CFTC speeches on those questions.
What the new commissioners would vote on
The SEC has a heavy crypto agenda for whoever sits at the table. Its rule on crypto broker-dealers is under review at the White House budget office, as described in our report on the OIRA filing, and a wider crypto asset rule that blockchain groups have lobbied it to change is in the works. With four members, such a rule could pass 3-1, with a recorded dissent.
At the CFTC, the big file is the crypto rulemaking opened this autumn, with comments due on 14 December (see our calendar entry for the CFTC comment deadline). Anonick and Rowland, who helped write CLARITY’s CFTC chapter, would arrive knowing the text better than most of the people commenting on it.
A Democratic commissioner cannot block rules on a three-to-one commission. What changes is the record: dissents get published, and a future Democratic majority, or a court, can lean on them.
Reactions from the CFTC and the crypto lobby
Selig called Anonick and Rowland “two strong bipartisan picks” and said he looked forward to working with them once confirmed, Cointelegraph reported. We found no statement from him on the CFTC’s own press page by Friday evening.
Ji Kim, chief executive of the Crypto Council for Innovation, congratulated the nominees in a post on X, writing that “both the CFTC and SEC will continue to play central and consequential roles in our financial markets” and that bipartisan representation is needed for rules that last, The Block reported. We found no public comment from the big exchanges or other trade groups by Friday evening, and no market move tied to the news.
Senate calendar: a narrow window before January
After the Banking hearing, the committee has to vote to send the SEC nominations to the floor, where confirmation takes a simple majority. The CFTC pair needs the same steps at Agriculture, starting with a hearing that has no date. The current Congress ends in early January, but floor work usually slows by mid-December for the holidays, CoinDesk noted.
Nominations that are not confirmed by the end of the session normally go back to the White House, and the president would have to send them again to a Senate run by Democrats. Pairing each Republican with a Democrat may make that easier, since the minority party has its own nominee on each slate. It does not guarantee them floor time.
Next on the calendar: the Banking hearing CoinDesk reported for 19 November, then the 14 December CFTC comment deadline. Agriculture has still to name a day.
European readers: the nominations change nothing for MiCA in the EU. They matter indirectly, through the US rules that shape which tokens, exchanges and funds can operate in the world’s largest market.