Republicans Press Ahead With PCAOB Kill

A key House committee voted Wednesday night to abolish the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, moving one early but important step forward in Republicans’ goal of ending the agency.

The House Financial Services Committee voted along party lines, Republicans in favor and Democrats against, to cease funding the PCAOB and transfer all its duties and powers to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is essentially the same legislation that Republicans unveiled late last week, taken from the Project 2025 playbook to gut oversight of the financial sector. 

This does not mean the death of the PCAOB is now inevitable. The bill still needs to be included in Congress’ massive tax and spending bill for the next fiscal year starting Oct. 1; that will require support from Republican leadership, and then that tax-and-spend bill needs to pass both the House and the Senate. Republicans themselves aren’t certain they’ll be able to pass that final bill themselves, which means they might need Democratic help, which means there could still be lots of horse-trading yet to come.

Then again, abolishing the PCAOB has been a dream of Republicans almost since the day they voted to establish the agency back in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Folding the agency into the SEC is a part of the Project 2025 plan right there Page 830 — and the author of that plan was Paul Atkins, now chairman of the SEC. 

So no, the death of the PCAOB is not a done deal; but a lot of powerful right-wingers in Washington are lining up to polish it off.