By Nick Devor

The Chicago enforcement division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is known as a group of heavy-hitters. Trial attorneys and investigators in the Chicago office have had a role in most major CFTC enforcement actions since the birth of the agency in 1975, including prosecuting self-serving traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the late '80s and pursuing civil charges against cryptocurrency fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried.

In recent months, that office has become a ghost town. A team once comprised of 20 enforcement attorneys now has one, people familiar with the office tell Barron's.

The CFTC changes come as the proliferation of cryptocurrency and prediction markets threatens to open the door to new forms of malfeasance and insider trading.

"Chicago is the spiritual home of the futures markets; it's where it all began," says David Slovick, a senior attorney in the Chicago enforcement division from 2009 to 2014. "To wipe out the enforcement staff in a place like Chicago sends a very bad signal to market participants about whether the government is watching what they're doing and whether or not they have to abide by the law."

Barron's spoke with six former CFTC litigators and leadership officials, four of whom worked in the Chicago enforcement division.

A CFTC spokesman said most of the staff separations at the agency stemmed from voluntary decisions tied to early retirement offers.

The CFTC has been in flux since Trump's second inauguration, when Caroline Pham was elevated from a CFTC commissioner to the agency's acting chair. Pham undertook a sweeping reorganization of the enforcement division and closed about half of its open cases -- sometimes without consulting the teams involved -- in a campaign against litigation she saw as "regulation by enforcement."

Attorneys from the Chicago office say her leadership represented a major shift in tactics.

In fiscal 2024, the CFTC brought 58 enforcement actions and won a record $17.1 billion in monetary relief. In fiscal 2025, the agency brought 13 enforcement actions resulting in less than $10 million, according to CFTC news releases.

On a single day last July, four of the five chief trial attorneys in the CFTC's Chicago enforcement division received reduction-in-force notices, as did the division's deputy director, two people told Barron's. The fifth chief trial attorney had already elected to retire early. Those six had a combined 103 years of experience at the agency.

The division of enforcement has historically had up to 20 trial attorneys in Chicago. As of Friday last week that number has fallen to one, who is working with the three remaining investigators and one paralegal, according to former attorneys in the office.

"I'm worried about the loss of deep expertise as people have left," says Dorothy DeWitt, the former director of the CFTC's division of market oversight. "As a regulator, in some ways you never have enough people, but the supply and demand curve is getting a little askew here."

Mike Selig took over as CFTC chair in December. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Selig was asked repeatedly whether the agency would be able to handle its burgeoning duties despite reduced staffing levels. "I am going to take a hard look at the resource needs," he told the senators, adding that "it is vitally important we have a cop on the beat."

For the CFTC, its Chicago division of enforcement has traditionally been the top cop.

"Chicago was known as an office that would take on difficult and groundbreaking cases in a way that some of the other offices did not," says Joe Konizeski, a former chief trial attorney who spent 26 years at the agency in Chicago before his position was eliminated in July.

Chicago is the birthplace of the global commodities market. The CFTC first exerted its authority over the Chicago Board of Trade in 1979 when it halted trading three times in 10 days after discovering market manipulation in potato, coffee, and wheat futures.

More recently, CFTC lawyers in Chicago handled the civil case against Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao, securing a $2.85 billion settlement in 2023 and permanently barring Zhao from the U.S. derivatives market. A year later, the CFTC took home its biggest win ever: a $12.7 billion settlement from failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. "I commend our Chicago-based team for their tireless efforts on behalf of FTX's victims, " CFTC division of enforcement director Ian McGinley said in a press release at the time.

Zhao separately pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations. He was pardoned for those crimes by President Donald Trump in October 2025.

Over the past year, the cuts in CFTC enforcement have largely hit Chicago.

Three former CFTC attorneys say the office's reputation made it an appealing target. "I believe I was retaliated against, along with some of my colleagues," says one who lost their job last summer.

The July cuts "demoralized" the office, according to an attorney whose position was spared in the cuts but has since left the agency.

Low staffing levels in the enforcement division have slowed the CFTC's pursuit of bad actors, according to the litigators Barron's spoke with. They expressed concerns about the loss of attorneys with deep institutional knowledge and decades worth of expertise.

The CFTC has recently been in the spotlight with the rise of prediction markets. Event contracts sold on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have boomed in popularity over the past year. Those contracts are regulated by the CFTC and have come under scrutiny as insider trading and market integrity concerns on prediction markets make headlines.

Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of Barron's.

The agency's portfolio could soon broaden. Last July, the U.S. House passed a bill that would give jurisdiction over most cryptocurrencies to the CFTC, rather than to the SEC.

The bill, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, is waiting on Senate action. Should it become law, former CFTC attorneys told Barron's that the division may be overwhelmed. "If crypto jurisdiction is given to the agency, enforcement is woefully understaffed to handle it," one says.

Many Chicago enforcement attorneys pushed out of the agency were mid-career. Konizeski, the former chief trial attorney, says he expected to stay at his job another decade or more.

"If I was a different person," he says, "I would launch a crypto scam right now, because there's no cops on the beat."

Write to Nick Devor at nicholas.devor@barrons.com

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February 09, 2026 15:55 ET (20:55 GMT)

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