"Under Chair Gensler, the SEC's unresponsiveness to committee's requests has been extremely slow and limited in comparison to that of previous chairs," Subcommittee Chairman Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., said in his opening statement.
In April, Mr. Huizenga, along with House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., sent a letter to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler requesting the SEC turn over documents related to the charges against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
This is just one of several requests that Republicans have sent to the SEC. In February, Mr. Huizenga, Mr. McHenry and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee requested additional information relating to the SEC's climate disclosure proposal.
In their questioning Thursday, Republicans pressed Ms. Barbero on the agency's responses to such requests, though she told ranking member Al Green, D-Texas, "We are very committed to providing the committee with the information that it needs," adding that her staff has collected 3.3 million documents in response to all of the committee's requests.
"This is not oversight; this is overreach run amok," Mr. Green responded.
Mr. Green also asked about the agency's climate disclosure proposal, to which Ms. Barbero said, "Climate-related risk can be just as important to businesses, to the nature and health of the business, as other things we might traditionally think about like physical assets or material contracts," adding that many companies disclose this information already.
In a hearing before the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, committee members on both sides of the aisle questioned Haoxiang Zhu, director of the SEC's division of trading and markets, and Jessica Wachter, chief economist and director of the SEC's division of economic and risk analysis, on a variety of SEC proposals, often questioning the agency's analysis and justifications for such proposals.
Subcommittee Chairwoman Ann Wagner, R-Mo., said, "Chair Gensler and Director Zhu have taken a wrecking ball to every corner of our current equity market structure in one fell swoop. And they've done so without any definitive explanation or identifying any systemic market problems or failures."
Ms. Wagner has reintroduced a bill known as the "SEC Regulatory Accountability Act." The bill, also introduced last December, would "require the SEC to identify the problem a proposed regulation is seeking to address and conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis" before issuing regulation, Ms. Wagner said at the hearing.
