SEC’s Hester Peirce Pushes Back on Senator Warren’s Crypto Enforcement Gripes

Considering she once boasted about raising her own "anti-crypto army" maybe it's not a surprise Sen. Elizabeth Warren is sad to see a more measured Securities and Exchange Commission and its approach to crypto.

But in a recent letter sent to SEC Chair Paul Atkins, Sen. Warren went further than just lamenting a pro-crypto SEC — she's now questioning whether Chair Atkins' earlier Congressional testimony was an attempt to "deliberately" mislead her about declining enforcement actions.

"Between 2015 and 2024, total enforcement actions ranged from 583, in 2024, to 868, in 2016, with an average of 765.7," Warren wrote. "In FY 2025, the Commission brought 456 total enforcement actions — which includes the 200 enforcement actions filed in the first quarter of FY 2025, under previous Chair Gary Gensler."

But in a new interview with Coinage, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce pushed back on Sen. Warren's logic, saying that framing misses the point entirely.

“Looking at numbers to assess the efficacy of an enforcement program is difficult,” she said, arguing that raw case counts obscure more than they reveal. "You can have a very small enforcement action that counts the same as a very large enforcement action. It can be very difficult to know how much work went into a particular enforcement action. There are some that are much more complicated to bring than others."

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Indeed, the new SEC under Chair Atkins has made it a point of emphasis to break from the old ways of doing things. Not only is regulating by enforcement not a priority, but he has celebrated a much more limited scope than his predecessor. Atkins recently joked about the agency reeling in its mandate as it works collaboratively with the CFTC on a crypto framework.

"We're not the 'Securities and Everything Commission' anymore," he said at a recent crypto conference in D.C. to great applause.

While the enforcement numbers are historically light, Commissioner Peirce defended the way the SEC is operating by noting a categorical difference in how the agency sees its role in trying to advise citizens on what they can and cannot do with their money.

Case in point: Commissioner Peirce's stance on memecoins. Last year, the SEC made it clear that memecoins do not fall under the SEC's jurisdiction and that they are not securities. Since then, volumes on Pump.Fun have dropped.

"I hope that people in the market who are buying things will take a look at what they're buying and have a reason for why they want to buy it," she said about memecoins. "That reason might be this is just fun, and I want to have some fun and this is entertainment for me. It may be that you have a long term value proposition for what you're buying, whether it's a meme coin or something else, and that's fine. But I want people to really know the SEC is not there to protect you."

But in the broader realm of securities, Commissioner Peirce refuted Sen. Warren's argument that declining enforcement actions means the SEC is purposefully letting things slide.

“There’s not a pass on securities violations,” Peirce said, emphasizing that the agency is still holding bad actors accountable across both traditional markets and crypto. “If people are thinking that this is an anything goes time… they’re going to be quite disappointed.”

Still, Sen. Warren asked for a written reply by April 28 from Chair Atkins to address what she called worrying developments on the enforcement side.

"The decline in enforcement follows reports of significant turmoil in the Division of Enforcement since the beginning of your tenure," she wrote, noting the abrupt departure of the agency's former Director of Enforcement who spent just six months on the job. "The Division has lost nearly 20% of its staff, including 13% in the Division of Enforcement in headquarters, and more across its regional offices."

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