Clarity Act Could Create Crypto Regulation Without Real…

Brookings Fellow Aaron Klein is raising a pointed warning about the Clarity Act: handing the CFTC sweeping new authority over digital asset markets without giving it the staff, funding, or structural capacity to exercise that authority is not regulation — it's the appearance of regulation.

Klein, speaking on CoinDesk's The Policy Protocol alongside Rebecca Rettig and Renato Mariotti, argued that the CFTC was built to oversee commodity futures markets and was never designed for the scale of responsibilities now being contemplated. He pointed to personnel departures and structural changes as signs that the agency's regulatory capacity is already under strain, and warned that fragmented oversight across multiple agencies risks repeating the coordination failures of the Dodd-Frank era.