June 4, 2026
A steep decline in whistleblower rewards indicates two US agencies are not upholding a legal mandate to incentivise reports of financial wrongdoing, lawyers told GIR.
The Securities and Exchange Commission denied more than 85% of claims submitted through its whistleblower rewards programme last year, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has denied more awards halfway through 2026 than it has in any of the previous five full years, according to a review of data by GIR.
Former agency lawyers view the denials, many of which have occurred contrary to the agencies’ established processes, as part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s shift of priorities to disfavour whistleblowers.
Meanwhile, an SEC decision to cut payout amounts shows that the administration is deprioritising incentives for people to come forward with evidence of financial misconduct, lawyers said.
“Protecting and supporting whistleblowers does not seem to be a priority of the leadership of either agency,” said Christina McGlosson, a former CFTC and SEC official now at Cohen & Milstein in Washington, DC. “And that’s disturbing.”
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“Carryover” to CFTC
On the CFTC side, denials are already higher in early June than any full year dating back to 2020.
The trend of denials seems to be a “carryover” from the SEC’s shifting priorities, said McGlosson of Cohen & Milstein.
McGlosson, who served in the CFTC’s enforcement division from 2017 to 2021 and as acting director of its whistleblower office from 2023 to 2024, noted that the agency had paid out nearly $200 million to a whistleblower in 2021. At the time, she said, it was the largest whistleblower reward under Dodd-Frank, only surpassed by a $279 million SEC award in 2023, she said.
The CFTC’s programme has been seen as a success story overall – so much so that it has occasionally faced funding difficulties, McGlosson said, pointing to a 2023 statement by US Senator Chuck Grassley warning that CFTC’s programme should not become a “victim of its own success”.
Now, she said, the number of denials has also corresponded with a large backlog in cases, the origin of which she called an “enigma”.
“Even older awards somehow are not being processed, and given the CFTC’s prior successes in this area, I fail to understand why that is,” she said.
The number of denials isn’t because of line-level staff, McGlosson said, instead calling it a more “systematic” issue.
“I supervised and hired many of the attorneys in that office, and I know those attorneys are exceptional,” she said. “No one can understand why nothing’s moving through the whistleblower office.”
Read “Disturbing” Drop in Whistleblower Payouts Alarms Lawyers.