The prospect of fewer regulatory guardrails may, on the surface, sound appealing to many finance teams. In practice, it may end up creating more risk and work for boards and the executives working with them, legal experts say.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter paved the way for the president to fire commissioners of independent agencies at will, overturning a nearly century-old precedent. The decision vests more power in whoever happens to be president, and it’s also another example of how loosened regulations may actually bring about waves of uncertainty for businesses.
Elaine Duffus, senior specialized consultant with Wolters Kluwer’s Financial Services Compliance Program Management solutions team, noted that priorities for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other similar independent agencies “will now shift more quickly with presidential administration.”
Duffus, who previously served as a chief compliance officer in the financial industry, said that financial institutions “can no longer assume that today’s guidance, enforcement priorities or supervisory emphasis will remain stable, so the whipsaw effect of the last two years will likely become the operating environment of the future.”
Writing in a blog post published earlier this month, CDF partners Tashayla Billington and Mark Spring had a similar take. “…we expect that the Trump v. Slaughter case is likely to result in continued and even greater ping-pong interpretations on many important issues,” they wrote
“Employers have long experienced significant swings in labor policy between administrations. Those swings are now likely to occur faster—and become even more pronounced,” they said in the post.
Speaking on the Bank Nerd Corner podcast published July 9, Spencer Fane partner Mike Silver said the Slaughter decision is likely to remove agencies’ incentives to “engage with stakeholders from all sides.” There’s a further risk, he added, of agencies simply becoming “echo chambers” under every successive presidential administration.
The ruling, Silver said, ultimately removes the “institutional prerogative to maintain at least a patina of harmony” at federal agencies.
For finance teams and C-Suites, regulatory awareness remains important, but Duffus suggested that firms go a bit further. Business leaders also will need “disciplined horizon scanning, documented interpretation, obligation mapping, clear ownership records, control alignment, and most importantly, evidence that compliance decisions were reasonable when made,” she said in an email to CFO.com.
“For most institutions, that will mean greater investment in their compliance programs and a significantly different way to do business,” Duffus added. “CFOs will certainly care about all that.”
Wolters Kluwer research has shown a dip in federal regulatory activity throughout 2025. The amount of penalties leveled, for instance, “continued to drop precipitously” in the second half of that year, with an 83% decline in monetary penalties issued.
“While the findings for H1 2025 pointed to a potentially fundamental reshaping both in the enforcement landscape and compliance priorities for financial services firms, the results from the second half of the year may reveal the outlines of a new regulatory consensus: highly selective and thematic regulatory supervision at the federal level, coupled with substantial private litigation and increased state-level oversight,” Wolters Kluwer researchers wrote in a March 2026 update on federal enforcement activity.
