Trump Nominates Ex-CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson and Three Others to SEC, CFTC

President Donald Trump sent four nominations to the Senate on Nov. 12 for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal derivatives regulator. Two are Democrats and two are Republicans, the first nominations to either agency this administration has made across party lines.

The SEC currently has two sitting commissioners, Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda, while CFTC Chairman Mike Selig runs his agency alone. In August, Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh said on Unchained’s Uneasy Money that the CFTC “still doesn’t have a bipartisan set of commissioners at it,” which he said would make its crypto decisions harder.

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Kristin N. Johnson, a Democrat from Michigan, would take the seat Caroline Crenshaw held, for a term running to June 5, 2029. Johnson served as a CFTC commissioner until September 2025. In 2023, when the agency settled charges against three decentralized finance (DeFi) operators, Opyn, Deridex and ZeroEx, she argued in a statement that DeFi platforms acting as intermediaries belong under a regulatory framework: “In my opinion, they can and should be regulated.”

Steven Levine, a Republican from Maryland, is nominated to the seat held by Hester Peirce, who led the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, for a term to June 5, 2030. Levine’s latest post was general counsel and a senior adviser at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Before that he worked at the SEC, where Uyeda named him deputy chief of staff in February 2025. Unchained found no public stance on crypto on record from Levine.

Both CFTC nominees come from the Senate Agriculture Committee, which shares jurisdiction over crypto market structure. Nathan Anonick, a Republican from Virginia, works for committee Chairman John Boozman as legislative counsel and helped negotiate the Agriculture Committee’s share of the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill. He would serve until June 19, 2031.

Matthew Rowland, a Democrat from Washington, D.C., is a CFTC attorney the agency lent to the committee as a detailee, working under the committee’s Democratic leaders, Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar and former Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow. In that role he had a hand in the Clarity Act as well as the committee’s 2024 crypto bill, according to Crypto in America’s Eleanor Terrett. He would fill a term ending April 13, 2028. Unchained found no public stance on crypto on record from either man.

If all four are confirmed, the SEC would have four of five seats filled and the CFTC three of five.

The Senate Banking Committee handles the SEC picks and the Agriculture Committee the CFTC picks. The calendar is short: Democrats flipped the Senate on Nov. 3 and take the gavel in January. Punchbowl News reported last month that Senate Republican leaders had set Nov. 20 as the date for committees to clear nominees, so they could be bundled into one last batch before the lame-duck session ends. Terrett wrote on X that the “bipartisan slate and cross-aisle interest in staffing both agencies could give Senate leaders reason to make exceptions.”

Related Listen: After Their Victory, Do Democrats Have a Mandate to Go After Crypto? Not So Fast

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