Young Kim Billionaires & Big Business California

Young Kim Calls Her SEC Bill 'Commonsense.' It Was Already Title IV of the Bill That Kills the Enron Watchdog.

Kim's REG Act sounds procedural. It passed committee bolted into a nine-title package that abolishes the accounting board created after Enron and lets corporate lawbreakers be fined once instead of hundreds of times. Her own press release says so.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 10, 2026

On June 24, 2026, Young Kim introduced H.R. 9434, the Reviewing the Expansion of Government Act — the REG Act.

It sounds like housekeeping. Here is how she described it:

"Federal policies should make life easier for Americans, not harder... The REG Act is commonsense legislation that will strengthen Congressional oversight of the SEC's rulemaking process and ensure its regulations are working as intended, not impeding the American Dream."

Six days earlier, on June 18, Ann Wagner had introduced a nine-title package with Kim's bill already inside it as Title IV — and named Kim as its sponsor in the press release announcing it. On June 30 the package passed the House Financial Services Committee, 28 to 23. Kim's own office put out a statement:

"Rep. Young Kim's (CA-40) Review the Expansion of Government (REG) Act passed out of the House Financial Services Committee as part of Capital Markets Subcommittee Chair Wagner's SEC Reform and Restructuring Act."

That's the part worth knowing about. Let's look at what Kim's bill is bolted into.

What Kim's bill is part of

H.R. 9329, the SEC Reform and Restructuring Act, is a nine-title package. Kim's REG Act is Title IV: "Consideration of cumulative effect of regulations required."

Here is the rest of the table of contents she is now traveling with:

Title V — "Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight." It folds the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board into the SEC, ending it as an independent body. The PCAOB is the board Congress created after Enron and WorldCom to register, inspect and discipline the accounting firms that audit public companies. The same policy was written into Trump's 2025 budget bill until the Senate parliamentarian ruled it out on June 19, 2025 as a policy change rather than a budget change. PCAOB Chair Erica Williams called that ruling "good news for millions of Americans whose retirement savings and investments would be put at risk by eliminating the PCAOB."
Title VIII — "Securities Enforcement Clarity." It redefines how many violations a lawbreaker committed. Under it, "a continuing failure to comply" counts as one violation. A company that breaks a securities rule every day for three years gets fined once.

We laid the whole package out in detail when Ann Wagner introduced it: Ann Wagner's New Bill Would Abolish the Accounting Watchdog Created After Enron — and Cut the SEC's Fines.

Kim's contribution is Title IV. Her press releases do not mention Titles V or VIII.

What Title IV actually does

Kim's REG Act is short. It inserts the same clause into four different securities laws — the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. In each, the economic finding the SEC is required to make before it can adopt a rule must now be made about that rule:

"when considered individually or cumulatively with other related rules or regulations or other related and recent proposed rules or regulations"

Kim frames this as making regulators "measure the full weight of their actions." In practice, adding analytical requirements to SEC rulemaking is how SEC rules get killed in court.

That is not a theory. In 2011 the D.C. Circuit threw out the SEC's proxy access rule in Business Roundtable v. SEC on the ground that the agency's cost-benefit analysis was inadequate. Writing about the aftermath, University of Pennsylvania law professor Jill Fisch described the decision as imposing "an onerous, and possibly insurmountable procedural burden" that "threatens to paralyze rulemaking by the SEC and other administrative agencies."

Every new box the SEC must check is a new argument an industry lawyer can make to a judge. "Cumulatively with other related rules" is an especially generous one, because there is no obvious limit to what counts as related.

Who pays her

Kim sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which writes the rules for the agency her bill would slow down.

According to OpenSecrets' PAC breakdown, she has taken $866,350 from the finance, insurance and real estate sector this cycle, against an average of $146,232 for a House member. That's nearly six times the average, and it is 45% of all the PAC money she has raised.

Her top contributors this cycle read like a roster of the industries the SEC and the banking regulators oversee: America's Credit Unions, Capital One, the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers, the credit-scoring company FICO, and the accounting firms Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers — $20,000 to $22,000 apiece. Widen the window to everything since 2020 and the totals grow: the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers PAC $40,000, the KPMG partners' and employees' PAC $35,000, Visa's PAC $30,000.

Note that last group. Title V of the package Kim's bill sits in eliminates the independent board that inspects and disciplines exactly those accounting firms. Kim is not the author of Title V — that one belongs to Bill Huizenga. She is, however, funded by those firms' political action committees, and neither of her two press releases about the REG Act mentions it.

And in the 2024 cycle, Fairshake — the crypto industry's super PAC, funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and the venture firm a16z — spent $1,924,213 in outside money supporting her. The SEC is the primary federal regulator of the securities those companies sell — and Kim's bill is designed to make its rules harder to write.

The "small business" framing

Wagner's press release sells the package as help for local businesses. Kim's says the SEC's rules "stifle access to capital and innovation, and burden small businesses, investors, and consumers alike."

The PCAOB inspects the audits of public companies — firms listed on stock exchanges. The penalty provision in Title VIII governs SEC enforcement against securities-law violators. Neither one reaches a family-run shop in Orange County.

What they reach is the enforcement and audit oversight that protects the retirement accounts of the people who live there.

Kim voted for the version of Trump's budget bill that carried the PCAOB elimination — the House passed it 215 to 214 on May 22, 2025, a month before the Senate parliamentarian struck the provision out. A group of her constituents has been counting the days since she last held an in-person town hall: as far as they can establish, she has not held one since she took office on January 3, 2021. Nobody has had the chance to stand up and ask her about any of this.