Congress Tucks a Digital-Dollar Ban Into a Housing Bill — and It Runs Through 2030

One of the biggest pieces of U.S. crypto policy this year is riding shotgun on a housing bill. The leaders of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees released updated text Tuesday for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and buried inside the sweeping package is language barring the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through December 31, 2030.

What's Actually in the Text

The bill, H.R. 6644, is built mostly to attack the housing crunch — boosting supply, lowering costs, and keeping institutional investors from crowding families out of the single-family market. But tucked into it is a clean line stating the Fed "may not issue or create a central bank digital currency" or anything substantially similar through the end of 2030. Critically, the provision carves out room for "open, permissionless private dollar assets" — read: stablecoins — as long as they preserve the privacy protections of physical cash.

That distinction is the whole ballgame. Lawmakers aren't trying to wall off digital dollars entirely; they're trying to make sure the version that wins is issued by private companies, not the government.

How It Got Here

This is the product of months of horse-trading. Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, House Financial Services Chair French Hill and Ranking Member Maxine Waters all signed off, framing it as years of bipartisan, bicameral work. Warren called it the biggest housing bill in more than 30 years. To close the deal, the Senate accepted a three-year sunset on a disaster-recovery block grant program and swallowed House priorities including nine community banking bills and new limits on institutional homebuyers.

The numbers behind it are not close. The Senate first attached the CBDC ban back in March, passing the package 89-10. The House cleared its amended version 396-13 in May. The updated text now heads back to the Senate floor.

Why It Matters

CBDCs have turned into a genuine partisan flashpoint, with critics warning a government-issued digital dollar could become a tool for financial surveillance. The anti-CBDC language was pushed by House Republicans and has White House backing — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently reiterated that a digital dollar is simply off the table. Representative Anna Paulina Luna and other House conservatives want to go further and make the ban permanent, arguing "CBDCs are bad for everyone."

For the crypto industry, a federal CBDC freeze that explicitly protects stablecoins is about as friendly an outcome as the policy debate offers. It clears the lane for the private dollar tokens that already settle billions a day, and it removes — at least until 2030 — the specter of a state-run competitor. The catch is the sunset date itself: this is a six-and-a-half-year pause, not a constitutional bar. The fight over whether it becomes permanent is just getting started.

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