Former Biden economic advisers Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein would have you believe that the fall in bitcoin’s price from its 2025 peak somehow justifies their administration’s approach to cryptocurrency. A master class in selective memory, their February 26 New York Times opinion piece leaves out the most consequential fact about Biden-era cryptopolitics: it was not a reasoned legislative framework.
The authors credit the Biden administration with “increasingly aggressive regulatory efforts to curb fraud and fraud.” This framing is extraordinary considering what happened on their watch. FTX grew to enormous scale during the Biden administration. Sam Bankman-Fried was a top Democratic donor and met with senior administration officials (including then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler) while running what became one of the largest financial frauds in history.
The administration’s strategy of regulation-by-enforcement, rather than establishing clear rules, had a perverse effect: legitimate, compliance-minded businesses were driven offshore or out of business, consumers were harmed, and American innovation was stifled. Meanwhile, bad actors like Bankman-Fried (who knew how to play political games) thrived on the confusion. When you refuse to write clear rules, the only people who benefit from them are those who never intended to follow them.
The authors conveniently ignore one of the most troubling episodes of the Biden era: “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” Under pressure from federal regulators, banks systematically dismantled legitimate crypto businesses, cutting them off from the financial system without due process, formal rulemaking, or legislative authority. The debanking campaign swept up ordinary individuals and small businesses who had turned to crypto because the traditional banking system had long underserved them. The Biden administration’s approach cuts consumers off from tools they used to participate in the financial system without putting a single policy through the democratic process of notice-and-comment rules.
The authors dismiss crypto as a “painfully slow and expensive database” with “almost no practical use.” They acknowledge in passing that crypto is used to transfer money
internationally, but wave this off as if enabling fast, cheap cross-border money transfers for millions of people is a trivial achievement.
It isn’t. Global remittances average nearly 6.5%, costing migrant workers and their families billions of dollars each year. Stablecoins running on blockchain networks can perform the same transfers in minutes at a fraction of the cost. This is an immediate, material economic improvement for families in developing countries. The Biden economists sat in “dozens of meetings” and came away apparently unimpressed. One wonders if they talked to any of the people these tools serve.
Beyond money transfers, blockchain technology supports a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications. Fidelity, JPMorgan, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Mastercard, Meta, Stripe, Block Inc. and Franklin Templeton is actively building on blockchain infrastructure. The claim by the Biden economists that no “giant tech companies” are using this technology is dead wrong.
The op-ed’s news hook is bitcoin’s price drop. Using short-term price movements to condemn an entire asset class is analytically nonsensical. Amazon’s stock is down 94 percent from its peak during the dotcom bust. By the Cummings-Bernstein standard, it should have been written off as “fundamentally worthless.” Volatility is a feature of nascent markets, not proof of worthlessness.
Furthermore, it labels the Bitcoin network as “slow”. What it lacks in speed, it makes up for in safety – a quality that should be of utmost importance to regulators. Outsiders or intermediaries cannot veto or reverse transactions between peers, unilaterally confiscate user funds, or tamper with their distributed ledger. This is why it is used all over the world in areas where ordinary citizens are targeted by their governments. Meanwhile, other blockchains enable payments at breakneck speed.
The authors repeatedly invoke the straw man of a taxpayer-funded bailout of the crypto industry. No serious politician (or crypto participant) has suggested anything of the sort. The stablecoin legislation Cummings and Bernstein reference create fully reserved payment instruments that are over-collateralized with the most liquid government bonds on earth. The Trump administration’s bitcoin reserve proposal involves no new taxpayer costs.
Meanwhile, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, the Biden administration approved extraordinary measures to guarantee all deposits. Their concern with moral hazard was apparently highly selective.
The op-ed devotes significant space to the crypto industry’s political donations, suggesting corruption. The proposition that an industry that favors favorable regulation through political participation is inherently corrupt would indict virtually every sector of the American economy. Denied a fair hearing by regulators, the crypto industry turned to the political process as a last resort — a cornerstone of American democracy. If political spending is problematic, the authors might start by examining their own side of the aisle during the Biden administration, when Bankman-Fried gave overwhelmingly to Democrats.
The Biden administration had a historic opportunity to establish the United States as the global leader in digital asset regulation: to write clear, fair rules that would protect consumers while allowing innovation to flourish on American soil. Instead, they chose to weaponize the banking system against a legitimate industry, creating a lose-lose-lose for innovation, consumer protection, and the US crypto ecosystem.
Cummings and Bernstein write that crypto’s boosters “have run out of excuses.” Rather, it is the crypto-haters of the Biden administration who owe the public an explanation.
