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The executive order arrived on a quiet Friday at the end of January and initially felt like a political footnote. In less than two pages, the White House revoked EO 14067, disbanded the “responsible digital-asset” framework created under President Biden, and, most explosively, barred every U.S. agency from issuing, piloting, or even promoting a central-bank digital currency. The text was sparse; the intent unmistakable.
Three months later, the consequences are no longer theoretical. By pulling the Federal Reserve out of Project Cedar, retreating from the BIS-led Project mBridge, and gagging Treasury officials who had been mapping a cross-border dollar pilot, Washington has ceded the initiative to Europe, where policymakers are racing to finalise a “digital euro,” and to Beijing, which is already moving oil money through e-CNY corridors.
From Shadow-Boxing to a Full Ban
President Donald Trump had flirted with the idea of a CBDC moratorium on the campaign trail, casting a digital dollar as an Orwellian “surveillance coin.” January’s order made it official. It did more than cancel the Fed’s research: it prohibited promotion of any sovereign token and ordered regulators to rewrite crypto policy around private-sector innovation. Within a week, the Treasury had scrubbed CBDC references from its public calendar; Federal Reserve staff reassigned to other payment-system tasks; and BIS working groups quietly replaced American panellists with alternates from the Gulf and Southeast Asia.
The White House framed the ban as a double victory: a defense of civil liberties and a signal to Silicon Valley that private tokens, not state ones, should drive U.S. fintech leadership. The President’s advisors also understood the electoral math. Crypto money may be a niche donor base, but its single-issue intensity and the overlap with libertarian swing voters are impossible to ignore. In the same news cycle, the administration suspended the IRS broker-reporting rule, another longtime ask of digital-asset lobbyists.
Yet the order fused two very different fears. One is legitimate anxiety about a government ledger that might track every retail transaction. The other is a more nebulous worry that programmable money, by definition, erodes individual autonomy. European architects of the digital euro, who have built privacy “floorplates” into the design, bristle at the comparison.
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