The CFTC office widely regarded as the regulator’s “top cop” has been reduced to non-existence—at the same time the Trump administration has sought to put the shrinking agency in charge of crypto and the exploding prediction market sector.
That massive reduction—of the key office’s entire litigation team—comes as the CFTC has raced in the last year to absorb the crypto and prediction market industries into its jurisdiction.
“If I was a different person I would launch a crypto scam right now, because there’s no cops on the beat,” one of the laid-off lawyers, a chief trial attorney who worked at the CFTC for 26 years, told Barron’s.
The CFTC did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on this story.
The reductions in the Chicago office’s legal staff, paired with the Trump CFTC’s new priorities, have markedly reduced the monetary relief secured by the agency via enforcement actions. In fiscal year 2024, the CFTC secured $17.1 billion in monetary relief on behalf of investors. That figure plummeted in 2025 by over 99.9%, to just $9.2 million.
“I don’t know why it’s hard to say we need more staff,” one senator, Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), told Selig at the time.
