Trump has made clear he sympathizes with corporate complaints. As he noted last month after picking Clayton, the SEC chief will “play an important role in unleashing the job-creating power of our economy by encouraging investment in American companies.”

The tone is troubling to investor advocates who credit an aggressive SEC for stemming a long tide of corporate wrongdoing.

Over the past 15 years, the agency has imposed numerous regulations required by two major laws, Dodd-Frank and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which Congress passed in 2002 after investors lost trillions of dollars in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom failures.

Mark Flannery, who stepped down as the SEC’s chief economist in December, said there is always an inherent tension between adding rules to protect shareholders or easing them to goose markets.

‘A Tradeoff’

“It’s a tradeoff,” said Flannery, who is now a business professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The question is, what’s the right balance?”

Trump signed a directive in early February ordering the Treasury secretary to review financial regulations, with an eye toward identifying policies that hurt U.S. competitiveness. While his administration framed the order as an attack on Dodd-Frank, the look back is likely to go deeper and touch on Sarbanes-Oxley as well.

The law has been on Trump’s radar for years. It required chief executives to swear to the accuracy of their books and set new, expensive rules for auditing the internal controls companies use to catch wrongdoing. In a 2008 CNN interview, the then-real estate mogul and reality TV star, said Sarbanes-Oxley was a classic case of government overreach, noting “it really puts this country at a competitive disadvantage.”

Statistics do show a dramatic drop in IPOs. The best year for U.S. listings was 1996 when 863 companies sold shares amid the tech bubble, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This decade, the high-water mark was 2014, when 362 companies went public. Last year, there were just 130 U.S. IPOs, compared with 1,367 on foreign markets.

‘A Disaster’