THE CBDC BAN DIED IN JUNE AND NOBODY SAID SO
On July 17, 2025 the House passed a ban on a central bank digital currency twice in one day.
Once as its own bill, H.R. 1919, the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. And once folded into the CLARITY Act as Title VI, sections 601 through 605, carrying the same short title.
The operative language was short. It added a paragraph to section 16 of the Federal Reserve Act saying a Federal reserve bank may not offer financial products or services directly to an individual, may not maintain an account on behalf of an individual, and may not issue a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar under any other name or label. A second section closed the indirect route, through a bank or other intermediary. A third reached the policy use. A fourth was a sense of Congress.
On June 1, 2026 the Senate Banking Committee reported CLARITY with an amendment in the nature of a substitute. The substitute struck Title VI. All of it.
You can see it in the Senate’s own printing of the bill. The reported text carries eighteen mentions of the phrase central bank digital currency. Sixteen of them sit inside deletion brackets. The two that survive are both in the long title at the top, the caption that describes what the bill does. The section numbers were handed to other subjects. Section 602 in the Senate version is a safe harbor for nonfungible tokens.
So the caption still said the bill would prohibit a central bank digital currency. The bill had not done that since the first of June.
That caption is what the Senate printed on the roll call Tuesday afternoon. Vote 234, the official record of a bill that failed 49 to 50, describes the measure as one that would amend the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit the Federal reserve banks from offering certain products or services directly to an individual and to prohibit the use of central bank digital currency for monetary policy.
None of which the text still did.
The standalone bill is the part worth holding onto. H.R. 1919 passed the House on July 17, 2025 and went to the Senate. Its most recent action, as of tonight, is that same July day fourteen months ago. Not a hearing, not a referral action, not a markup. Nothing.
There is a version of this that is not sinister. Committees cut titles that belong in other bills all the time, and a chairman marking up a market structure bill can reasonably decide the Federal Reserve Act is somebody else’s jurisdiction. That is a real argument and nobody has had to make it, because nobody asked.
The part that should not pass is the caption. A bill’s long title is the one sentence most people ever read about it, and it is what the clerk prints next to the vote. For three and a half months it advertised a prohibition the text no longer contained, and it was still doing it on the day the Senate voted.
Everybody spent Tuesday counting who killed market structure. The thing that was quietly taken out in June is still out, and the bill that would put it back has not moved since the summer before last.