Earlier this month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) submitted its Fiscal Year 2025 Whistleblower & Customer Education Report to Congress, a statutorily mandated account of the agency’s whistleblower program. The report provides useful data on tips received and awards granted, but it also highlights a troubling trend: the CFTC’s whistleblower award cadence and award amounts have slowed and lowered substantially, and the program continues to suffer from a structural funding flaw that Congress must fix.
Data Points . . . Down
The FY 2025 report shows the CFTC received 1,697 Form TCRs (tips, complaints, and referrals) during the fiscal year—a strong intake that demonstrates the program’s ongoing relevance to market surveillance and fraud detection. Around 203 whistleblower award applications were filed.
Yet when it comes to awards, the numbers fall far short. CFTC issued only two award orders, granting three applications and paying out roughly $4.6 million in whistleblower awards. This is the fewest whistleblower awards the CFTC has granted since 2016.
The report also notes a significant number of denials on the award review front, which may reflect the program’s increasingly conservative award determinations.
Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results
The FY 2025 award totals are especially striking when compared to the CFTC’s own recent history. Over the last five to six years, the Commission has periodically issued massive whistleblower awards—the kind of headline-level payments that demonstrate both the value of whistleblower information and the scale of enforcement outcomes the program can generate when it functions at full capacity.
Most notably, in October 2021, the CFTC announced what remains the program’s largest award: approximately $200 million paid to a single whistleblower. That award was a watershed moment for the program, confirming that the CFTC’s whistleblower office could operate at a scale comparable to the SEC’s—at least when funding and timing aligned.
The Commission followed that award with other very large payments in subsequent years, including a $100 million award in 2023. And in 2024, the agency announced a $55 million whistleblower award. These awards underscore that major enforcement matters—and major whistleblower contributions—continue to exist in the CFTC pipeline.
Against that backdrop, the 2025 report’s totals do not look like the natural ebb and flow of enforcement. Instead, they look like a program that is still receiving a steady volume of tips, but is increasingly unable to translate that pipeline into timely, meaningful award outcomes at anything close to the scale seen in the recent past.
A Victim of Its Own Success
Apart from the downward pressure on awards and award amounts, advocates are also concerned that a related issue—essentially a structural defect in the program’s funding model—further contributes to the hobbling of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program. The CFTC whistleblower program is financed through the Customer Protection Fund (CFP), which is capped by statute. As originally enacted, the CPF had a $100 million cap, meaning all award payments and program costs had to be paid from collections up to that ceiling; any excess sanctions ultimately revert to the U.S. Treasury instead of the CPF.
This cap created an immediate vulnerability. Large sanctions, while a sign of effective enforcement, can quickly deplete the fund because whistleblowers are entitled to 10–30% of collected sanctions that result from their disclosures. When the CPF neared exhaustion — sometimes due to a single large award—the program teetered on collapse. That threat prompted emergency, short-term congressional fixes starting in 2021, including separate funding for Office of the Whistleblower operations and temporary increases to the cap.
These are stopgap measures, not solutions. Funding remains contingent on ad hoc congressional action, leaving the program perpetually under threat and unable to plan or commit to larger awards despite robust enforcement activity.
The Path Forward
The CFTC’s 2025 report should prompt serious attention from advocates of fair markets. Slow and low awards undermine the economic incentive central to the statute. And this in turn weakens market participants’ confidence in coming forward—the very behavior the whistleblower program was designed to incentivize.
In addition, Congress needs to move on a permanent funding fix to institutionalize short-term fixes and ensure the program’s sustainability. Strengthening the whistleblower program’s funding mechanics is not simply a bureaucratic matter. It affects the program’s ability to deliver timely and meaningful awards, sustain tip engagement, and support robust enforcement.
