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SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced the appointment of four new officials to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the independent organization tasked with overseeing public companies' accounting created after the Enron scandal. The new chairman, Demetrios (Jim) Logothetis, retired from Ernst & Young in 2019 after 40 years with the Big Four firm. Two new board members were appointed: Mark Calabria, who made his name as a proponent of loose regulations for financial institutions at the Cato Institute and served as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in Trump's first term, and Kyle Hauptman, who worked at Lehman Brothers and the conservative American Enterprise Institute and currently chairs the National Credit Union Administration.
Senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the appointments: "Trump's SEC Chair Paul Atkins has already weakened the rules that protect the investments and retirement accounts of Americans. Now he's appointed a new group of industry players and Trump loyalists to a board created to keep auditors honest after the Enron scandal." Corporate governance expert Francine McKenna wrote: "Appointing a retired Big 4 audit partner—a 40+ year veteran of EY—as Chair of the audit regulator is a slap in the face to everyone who has ever suffered through an accounting fraud, especially one EY missed."
The appointments tie the independent watchdog more closely to the White House than it has been since Congress created it more than two decades ago. Hauptman and Calabria's ties to the Trump administration and their records of advocating for deregulation raise concerns about the board's independence. The Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 previously floated abolishing the PCAOB altogether in its blueprint for Trump's second term, and lawmakers attempted to eliminate the agency in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though that provision was eventually struck.