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 later, on June 30, the bill passed the House Financial Services Committee. But not on its own. Kim's own office explained what happened:

"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 now bolted to.

What Kim's bill got attached to

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 — against an average of $146,176 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 read like a roster of the industries the SEC and the banking regulators oversee: the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers ($40,000), Visa, Capital One, America's Credit Unions, the credit-scoring company FICO, and the big accounting firms — KPMG ($35,000), Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Note that last group. Title V of the package Kim's bill rode into committee eliminates the independent board that inspects and disciplines exactly those accounting firms. Kim is not the author of Title V. She is, however, funded by the firms it would benefit, and she put out two press releases about the package without mentioning it.

And more than $1.9 million in outside money has been spent supporting her by Fairshake, the crypto industry's super PAC funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and the venture firm a16z. 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 Aye on Trump's budget bill — the one that carried the PCAOB elimination in the first place. She has not held a single in-person town hall since taking office in January 2021, which means no constituent has had the chance to stand up and ask her about any of this.

Source

Rep. Young Kim's REG Act Passes House Financial Services Committee — Office of Rep. Young Kim, June 30, 2026, and Rep. Young Kim Introduces REG Act to Rein in SEC Overregulation, June 24, 2026. Bill text from congress.gov and govinfo. Photo: official congressional portrait.