Conservative Investor Group, NLPC challenges recent SEC policies

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Atkins’ SEC: Where Billionaires and Their Woke Corporate Allies Find Protection

by NLPC staff, 27th January, 2026.

With the Trump administration, we were promised a return to property rights and accountability. Instead, the President’s hand-picked SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has tried to mute shareholders with a muzzle professionally fitted by the same law firm that spends its days teaching “woke” CEOs how to ignore the people who actually own their companies.

The most egregious act of this new regime came on Friday. In a blunt update to its Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations, the Moloney-led staff declared they would now “object” to voluntary submissions of Notices of Exempt Solicitations to the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) platform. NESes are informative reports that NLPC has circulated to investors at various companies over the last few years to advocate our positions on proxy voting items like proposals and board nominees.

The SEC’s excuse for this crackdown is as insulting as it is transparent. They claim these filings are used for “generating publicity.” That’s an interesting conclusion, considering no one at the SEC within the cubicles under Moloney’s authority bothered to call us to ask us what our motives are. Since NLPC, along with a few others who we assume were not consulted, were singled out as “frequent filers” of the reports, you’d think someone at the SEC might be curious.

Instead, Moloney the mind-reader and his fellow seers jumped to their own biased conclusions and took action. Atkins and Moloney have decided that if you don’t have $5 million in stock, you don’t have the right to speak on the SEC’s digital public square. They are treating the EDGAR system—a public resource—like an elite country club where the dues are $5 million, and the only topic allowed for discussion is how great corporate management is doing. We are sure CEOs like Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Comcast‘s Brian Roberts, and General Motors‘ Mary Barra are ecstatic at this development.

The SEC likes to pretend this is about “saving the taxpayer money” following the government shutdown. This is a flat-out lie. The EDGAR system is automated. Organizations like NLPC pay thousands of dollars a year to outside filing services to format and upload our documents (itself a costly regulatory burden, like having to pay a CPA to do your taxes for what should be a simple process). But it costs the taxpayer literally nothing for us to hit “submit” to EDGAR.

At NLPC, we’ve seen this movie before. We know that when the powerful try to silence you, it’s usually because you’re telling a truth they can’t afford to hear. Atkins and Moloney can lock the gates of EDGAR, but they can’t stop the shareholders from realizing they’ve been sold out by the very people hired to protect them.