This bill would accelerate Donald Trump's unprecedented corruption.
Donald Trump's main campaign promise was that he would lower prices from day one — that was his promise, his exact words. But in reality, Trump's tariffs, Trump's forever war on the other side of the world, Trump's healthcare cuts, Trump's shutdown of cheaper clean energy — Trump's policies are driving up the cost of everything. From groceries to gasoline, from healthcare to utilities, everything is going up, up, up.
While Donald Trump drives up costs for working people, he is also using the presidency to enrich himself, and he has added cryptocurrency to his money-making schemes. Instead of stepping up prosecutions of crypto scams and stopping terrorists and drug traffickers from using cryptocurrency, Donald Trump has used his office to promote cryptocurrency. He hyped crypto, held a crypto contest with dinner with the president as the prize, and appointed crypto-friendly regulators. So the money just keeps flowing to him.
Shortly before he was sworn in for his second term as president, Trump launched his own crypto business. Boy, that guy got off to quite a start. He hyped cryptocurrency while the money kept pouring in. In 2025 alone, Trump and his family earned $1.4 billion from their crypto projects. In fact, Donald Trump made more money from cryptocurrency last year than any publicly listed crypto company in the United States. No one is better positioned to profit personally from this bill than the President of the United States.
OK, so Trump is winning big in crypto. Who is losing? The working people who followed their leader. People who bought Trump's crypto projects have already lost billions of dollars. For example, fans who bought Trump meme coins have lost nearly $4 billion. And Trump keeps touting the crypto industry. He disbanded the Justice Department's crypto enforcement team, rolled back crypto enforcement actions against companies that donated millions to his campaign, and repeatedly pardoned convicted crypto executives. Trump's corruption is so widespread that it has eroded the entire crypto financial regulatory framework. Now Republicans are not only turning a blind eye to Trump's corruption; they now want to vote to enable that corruption today.
Late Sunday night, Republicans unveiled a new ethics provision negotiated between Republicans and the White House. These provisions read exactly like something our most corrupt president in history would approve — a tiny fig leaf claiming they are taking action on corruption, but carefully worded to ensure it won't stop Donald Trump from earning his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits.
First, the new text guarantees that Donald Trump will never, ever be held accountable under the law. Why? Because Trump's lackeys will have the power to shut down any ethics enforcement against Donald Trump. The text says the Attorney General — you know, the one who said at his confirmation hearing, "I am Trump's lawyer, not America's lawyer," Trump's lawyer — this person will decide whether to take enforcement action against the president. The bill would not allow state attorneys general to take any enforcement action against the president. All they can do is try to sue Trump's former personal lawyer, the Attorney General, to make him do something. And the best part: no one thinks the Attorney General will take action against Donald Trump.
But the bill has a built-in double lock to ensure Donald Trump's money-making scheme keeps rolling along. The bill says Trump's handpicked crony at the Office of Government Ethics can wave a magic wand, issue a legal opinion, and then, like magic, Donald Trump will suddenly be protected, completely immune from any enforcement against his next crypto scam. An ethics restriction that the president himself can render completely ineffective is no ethics restriction at all.
Second, even if these provisions could be enforced, there are huge loopholes that would let Trump continue profiting from his crypto empire. Under the new text, Trump would be allowed to continue earning hundreds of millions of dollars from his crypto projects, including World Liberty Financial and his meme coin. Trump could not only easily retain or restructure existing crypto projects, but also create new ones — additional corruption. For example, the new text does absolutely nothing to stop Donald Trump from becoming the first president in American history to own and regulate his own bank. Finally, Trump could put his assets into a nominal blind trust while still knowing exactly what's in it, and still controlling the regulators who can pump up the value of Donald Trump's crypto investments. Trump has already made $1.4 billion in 2025 alone as a crypto grifter, and the bill Republicans want to vote through today will ensure he can keep raking it in.
The ethics provisions aren't the only bad part. This bill would make it easier for terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and rogue states to buy and sell weapons and bribe government officials — all using cryptocurrency. Making it easier for terrorists to fund their operations and harder for law enforcement to catch them. Making it easier for scammers to defraud Americans and harder for law enforcement to catch them. Making it easier for Iran and North Korea to evade sanctions and harder for law enforcement to catch them.
This bill would put all of us at risk of an economic collapse triggered by cryptocurrency. This crypto bill has turned into a Christmas tree, hung with gifts for other high-risk scammers. For example, the bill would blow a giant hole in our nearly century-old securities laws, allowing and encouraging companies with nothing to do with cryptocurrency to dump assets onto the blockchain to evade the investor protections that apply to traditional securities—you know, like stocks, the stock market. It could siphon billions of dollars out of our stock market, which families rely on to fund their retirement savings; it could also destroy the guardrails built after the Great Depression. In fact, labor unions oppose this bill precisely because they believe it would put workers' hard-earned pensions at risk. Seriously, you should ask yourself: what does this have to do with cryptocurrency? Why should we write provisions to blow up stock market protections just because a few crypto bros want it?
This bill would give banks a green light to use Americans' bank deposits for a whole new range of high-risk crypto activities: lending against cryptocurrency as collateral, directly buying cryptocurrency, trading crypto derivatives, operating blockchain nodes, selling crypto software—the list goes on and on. Think about how cryptocurrency prices have gone up and down, up and down, just in the past few years, and then imagine what happens when the largest U.S. banks use the money in your savings account to stockpile huge amounts of that cryptocurrency. The bill would also stop states and tribal nations from enforcing their own existing laws to protect their citizens from fraud. The chairman of the Indian Gaming Association called this bill, "the greatest threat to tribal sovereignty in a generation."
This is not what the American people want. They want Congress to act on the cost-of-living crisis. They want an end to Trump's war in Iran. They want elected leaders to step up and regulate artificial intelligence. According to a survey by the crypto news outlet CoinDesk, only 1% of respondents listed cryptocurrency as their top concern. Another poll found that if voters want anything done about cryptocurrency, it is meaningful anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures. And that is exactly what this bill clearly fails to do.
So you have to ask yourselves, why are we here? We need crypto regulation, yes, we do, but we do not need a crypto bill drafted by the crypto industry that benefits only the most extreme voices in the crypto industry, at the expense of our national security and economic stability, and helps the most corrupt president in American history get richer. I urge my Republican colleagues to come to the negotiating table and negotiate a real bipartisan crypto bill. But until then, I urge my colleagues to vote no. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the floor.
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