The SEC's Spring 2026 agenda reads like a planning document. Treat it as one

The SEC has released its Spring 2026 Regulatory Flexibility agenda, a catalog of nearly 40 prerule and proposed-rule items spanning all the major operating divisions ^[1][6]. Most are strongly deregulatory, a majority were not on the 2025 agenda, and the Commission had not previously announced some of the topics at all ^[2][7][3], which is why this belongs in your planning cycle rather than your clippings file.

Chairman Paul Atkins, in a statement published on July 7, 2026, described the agenda as "robust rulemaking" that will return the agency to its "core mission of protecting investors; facilitating capital formation; and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets" ^[4].

The scale of the shift is the substance. The 2025 agenda, Atkins's first, was relatively lean: a handful of active rulemakings, several of them formal withdrawals of proposals from Gary Gensler's agenda ^[5]. A year later the list runs to nearly 40 items ^[6], and because a majority are new, more than 20 rulemaking efforts now sit on the agenda that were not there last year ^[19]. Most are designated "deregulatory" under Executive Order 14192, "Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation," which requires agencies to identify at least 10 existing regulations for repeal for every new regulation introduced ^[11]. New items reach broker-dealers, investment advisers, clearing agencies, transfer agents and others ^[10]. Rather than extending the regulatory perimeter, the stated focus is reducing compliance burdens, facilitating capital formation, and giving digital assets greater regulatory certainty ^[9].

Three named items carry the most operational weight: amendments to the books-and-records rule for broker-dealers and registered investment advisers, the custody rule for registered advisers, and certain proxy rules to modernize the proxy system ^[8].

Recordkeeping is where the money already went. Rule 204-2 is the foundational books-and-records rule for SEC-registered advisers, requiring true, accurate and current records of the advisory business ^[15]. Rule 17a-4(b)(4) requires broker-dealers to retain all communications relating to their "business as such," a phrase that has been in the rule since 1961 and has never been defined ^[16] - 65 years of an undefined obligation ^[20]. Beginning in 2022, the SEC and FINRA brought a wave of enforcement ^[17]. Firms bought archiving, surveillance and attestation programs sized to an undefined term under enforcement pressure. A definition would reset both the compliance spend and the litigation posture, in either direction.

The finders item is the capital-formation piece. Section 3(a)(4)(A) of the Exchange Act defines a broker as a person engaged in the business of effecting securities transactions for the account of others, and the SEC has historically read "effecting" broadly ^[12]. According to the Sidley Austin memorandum on which this analysis rests, a person whose activities do not directly result in the consummation of a sale should arguably be permitted to act as an unregistered finder, which would not require FINRA or other self-regulatory organization membership ^[13]; formal rulemaking, the firm argues, would likely produce more explicit and durable guidance than the current patchwork ^[14]. The analysis comes from Sidley partners writing on a firm memorandum, not from the Commission ^[18].

Two cautions. Details on the agenda are limited ^[2], and a prerule entry is a signal of intent, not text. The "deregulatory" designation is an administrative label attached under an executive order ^[11], not evidence that any burden has yet been lifted.

Watch which items move from prerule to proposed rule, and whether the recordkeeping and custody proposals arrive with actual definitions attached. Those are the ones with existing spend behind them.