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Make the retail digital dollar ban permanent once enacted, and let the Federal Reserve keep researching wholesale settlement technology that has nothing to do with individual accounts.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The Innovation Party supports the bipartisan bar on the Federal Reserve opening digital-currency accounts for individual Americans, on track to take effect July 10, 2026, and it should be made permanent before its scheduled 2030 expiration. A retail central bank digital currency would place one government institution in a direct, revocable relationship with every dollar in a person's daily spending, a degree of financial visibility no existing U.S. payment instrument concentrates in a single hand. This issue concerns individual accounts held directly at the central bank. Interbank settlement is a separate question, and Washington's own rhetoric about "CBDCs" collapses the two constantly.
Congress has already answered the individual-account question, and it did so with almost no fight at all. The Senate passed the retail-CBDC ban 85 to 5. The House passed it 358 to 32. A subject both parties' messaging treats as a partisan flashpoint produced a bipartisan landslide in both chambers.
That consensus shouldn't automatically extend to the separate question the ban itself exempts: wholesale settlement between banks and central banks. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is already testing tokenized wholesale settlement through the Bank for International Settlements' Project Agorá. China has built a competing rail, Project mBridge, that by late 2025 was settling trade between China and Gulf states entirely outside the dollar-clearing system. Sitting out that competition because the technology shares a name with the retail idea Congress just banned would give up ground in dollar settlement infrastructure for no gain to anyone worried about a Fed-run bank account.
Convert the retail-CBDC prohibition from a four-year rider on a housing bill into permanent statute.
Preserve and reaffirm the wholesale-settlement exemption already written into the ban, so a future bill doesn't erase the distinction by accident.
Direct the Federal Reserve to continue wholesale tokenization pilots like Project Agorá, with an annual public report to Congress on dollar-settlement competitiveness.
If any future Congress revisits retail CBDC, require it to meet the design standards the Fed's own 2022 policy paper already set: privacy-protected, bank-intermediated, never a direct Fed-to-consumer account.
Meet the financial-inclusion case for a retail CBDC with tools built for that purpose directly, low-cost account standards and expanded postal-banking pilots, instead of a central-bank account that the Fed's own research on instant payments suggests wouldn't reach the unbanked anyway.
"Central bank digital currency" is not one policy question. It is two, and they call for different answers.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.