Days after JPMorgan Chase & Co. admitted to bashing President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the Federal Reserve is seeking comments on its proposal that would stop government oversight from pressuring banks to cut ties with legitimate customers based on their activities, including crypto businesses.
“We’ve heard troubling cases of debanking — where regulators use concerns about reputational risk to pressure financial institutions to debank customers because of their political views, religious beliefs or involvement in disadvantaged but legitimate businesses,” including cryptocurrency, said Vice Chairwoman of Supervision Michelle W. Bowman.
“Discrimination against financial institutions on these grounds is illegal and does not play a role in the Federal Reserve’s supervisory framework,” she added.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in its capacity as supervisor of national banks, had already moved to remove reputational factors from its supervision last year, and the Federal Reserve had similarly announced in July that such risk would no longer be part of its bank examinations, so this rulemaking process would codify that move.
Crypto debanking has been well documented and freely acknowledged by banking regulators appointed by Trump, although new examples continue to emerge. In a response to a lawsuit filed last month by Trump and the Trump Organization, JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, said for the first time that it suspended more than 50 Trump accounts in February 2021. JPMorgan did not specify a reason for closing the accounts. On November 23, 2025, Jack Mallers, CEO of crypto payment firm Strike, wrote a post on social media that immediately went viral, saying that JPMorgan was closing all of its accounts without reason.
In a January 26 memo to the Board of Governors, the Fed’s staff wrote that the board’s proposal would “codify the removal of reputational risk from the board’s supervisory programs” and prohibit the Fed from “encouraging or coercing” banks to deny or condition services to customers engaged in “politically disadvantaged but lawful business activities.”
In the proposal, the Fed Board said it intends to include “permitted payment stablecoin issuers” in its definition of covered banking organizations after implementing separate rules, a move that could directly affect crypto-native firms seeking access to the banking system.
The Fed said comments on its proposal to remove reputational risk from its supervision of banks are due in 60 days from February 23.
