GOP senators propose ban on central bank digital currencies

Republican senators introduced legislation Monday that would ban official cryptocurrencies backed by central banks, a type of proposed digital asset that the Biden administration and Federal Reserve have expressed interest in studying.

GOP senators said that Fed-backed cryptocurrencies would pose privacy concerns and allow regulatory authorities access to the private spending habits of individual Americans.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) described Fed-backed digital currencies, which are also known as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) or stablecoins, as “programmable money that, if not designed to emulate cash, could give the federal government … significant transaction-level data down to the individual user.”

The Biden administration has been interested in studying the use of cryptocurrencies since 2022, when it issued a wide-ranging executive order on the technology and received reports from various agencies on how to incorporate it into the economy.

“Recognizing the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC), the reports encourage the Federal Reserve to continue its ongoing CBDC research, experimentation, and evaluation,” the White House said in a 2022 statement.

Both the Fed and the Treasury Department have been studying the potential uses of and structures for CBDCs, starting a working group to explore their applications. Even so, the White House has not explicitly endorsed the creation of a CBDC, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank will not create one without an act of Congress.

“Like existing forms of money, a CBDC would enable the general public to make digital payments. As a liability of the Federal Reserve, however, a CBDC would be the safest digital asset available to the general public, with no associated credit or liquidity risk,” the Federal Reserve says on its website.

“Both real time payment systems and CBDCs present opportunities to build a more efficient, competitive, and inclusive U.S. payment system,” Nellie Liang, Treasury Department under secretary for domestic finance, said last year.

Monday’s initiative from GOP senators signals that any such research and development on Fed stablecoin technology could be a site of increasingly hostile partisanship.

The GOP proposal would bar the Fed from authorizing Fed stablecoins for individuals to use and credit unions, retail banks, financial cooperatives and other types of third parties to issue to their members or customers.

Those provisions will relieve the banks, which have long sought to stifle proposals to use digital currencies to get around the commercial banking sector, essentially turning banks into a public utility.

Providing stablecoins through the buffer of third-party financial institutions was considered a compromise between the privacy risks associated with directly issuing them and the efficiency gains of cutting out the commercial middlemen. But the Republican bill could do away with that possibility altogether.

Cryptocurrency firms have long resisted moves to standardize their industry despite failures of large companies in the sector, wild volatility in asset values, runs on stablecoins and the use of inherently hard-to-trace crypto for criminal activity.

“Commingling of customer and firm assets, conflicts of interests, and lack of risk management and other standards contributed to” troubling episodes for the crypto business, Liang said last year. Crypto firm FTX was the sector’s biggest failure, and its former executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, is now behind bars.

Central bank digital currencies have been a hot topic internationally, as well. Advocates have championed the notion, while authorities have sounded notes of caution.

“Providing the general public with access to central bank money could take a jurisdiction into uncharted waters,” the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Fed’s international coordinating body, wrote in a 2019 study.

“A CBDC entails huge operational consequences for central banks in implementing monetary policy,” the BIS noted.