You’ve heard about the JOBS Act, right?
It’s been a minute, but it’s a good time to brush up, because today is an important day. A day we’ve been waiting for. Quite possibly real deal.
Today, a new Republican Congress – led by a new and very different House Financial Services Committee Chairman – will kick off a revamped, retooled, fairly serious and somewhat promising campaign to “expand investment opportunities.” As the Majority Staff memo makes explicit, today’s hearing draws directly on political DNA of the JOBS Act of 2012.
Today’s hearing promises to examine “thirteen years of evidence” and “assess the JOBS Act’s impact, explore remaining regulatory obstacles…and consider reforms to enhance capital formation.” The hearing will build on a foundation that was laid last Congress by former HFSC Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and set forth in detail last year in Project 2025.
The fact that the Committee has noticed some 36 bills in connection with the hearing speaks not only to how long this initiative has been in the making, and ambitious its goals are, but how long its aims have been stymied and frustrated – denied their rightful place in the sun, or ash-heap of history, according to ones perspective. Truly, many of these bills have been been kicking around, in limbo, for a decade.
Eight years ago, at the dawn of the first Trump Administration, a prior Republican Congress and a prior Republican House Financial Services Committee Chairman embarked on a campaign to rewrite the federal securities laws in ways that would dramatically expand the size and scope of the private offering marketplace. Just as now, the goal was to link private markets to middle class investors, mutual funds, mom and pop investors – essentially the entirety of the investing public.
For a whole host of reasons – bad timing, bad luck, bad messaging – the 2017 effort coughed, sputtered, collapsed under its own weight, and ultimately amounted to almost nothing.
A last ditch, bipartisan effort in 2018 – which saw Hensarling suddenly working hand-in-hand with Democratic Ranking Member Maxine Waters (CA) – proved to be a day late and a dollar short.
Indeed, when Jeb Hensarling set down his gavel in 2019, and when MAGA 1.0 left Washington DC two years later, the federal securities laws remained largely as they had been on the day Trump took office – to the surprise of many in Washington and on Wall Street.
Trump’s victory in November 2024 has given Republicans a second chance to replicate the JOBS Act, and seize the policy win that eluded Chairman Hensarling in 2017 and 2018, and subsequently Chairman McHenry.
In our estimation, Chairman Hill has a vastly better feel for capital markets policy than Hensarling and is a nimbler and more pragmatic leader of the HFSC overall. Hill is also unencumbered by the baggage and resentments that former Chair McHenry so visibly wore on his sleeve from the day that Senator Merkley gleefully rewrote Title III or the original JOBS Act, ruining federal crowdfunding forever in the eyes of the future Chairman, and seemingly breaking McHenry’s heart.
We believe that the 119th Congress is the last, best chance for a political and policy successor to the JOBS Act. We will be at today’s HFSC hearing and all follow-on hearings, and we will be following all developments related to the relevant legislative proposals closely.
We will share our impressions along the way, and we’re interested in learning yours.
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