Biden’s former economic advisers, Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein, would have us believe that bitcoin’s price drop from its 2025 peak somehow vindicates his administration’s approach to cryptocurrencies. A master class in selective memory, February 26 New York Times opinion article omits the most consequential fact about Biden-era crypto policy: it was not a reasoned regulatory framework.
The authors credit the Biden administration with “increasingly aggressive regulatory efforts to curb scams and fraud.” This framing is extraordinary, given what happened under his command. FTX grew on an enormous scale during the Biden administration. Sam Bankman-Fried was a top Democratic donor and met with top administration officials (including then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler) while directing what became one of the largest financial frauds in history.
The administration’s strategy of regulating through enforcement, rather than establishing clear rules, had a perverse effect: Legitimate, compliance-minded companies were driven out of the country 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 in the confusion. When you refuse to write clear rules, the only people who benefit are those who never intended to follow them.
The authors conveniently ignore one of the most disturbing episodes of the Biden era: “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” Under pressure from federal regulators, banks systematically debanked legal crypto companies, isolating them from the financial system without due process, formal regulation, or legislative authority. The debanking campaign swept away ordinary people and small businesses who had turned to cryptocurrencies because they had long been neglected by the traditional banking system. The Biden administration’s approach deprived consumers of the tools they were using to participate in the financial system, without subjecting a single policy to the democratic notice-and-comment regulatory process.
The authors dismiss cryptocurrencies as a “painfully slow and expensive database” with “almost no practical use.” They acknowledge in passing that cryptocurrencies are used to transfer money
internationally, but we ignore this as if enabling fast, low-cost cross-border remittances for millions of people is a trivial achievement.
It is not. Global remittance fees average nearly 6.5%, costing migrant workers and their families billions of dollars each year. Stablecoins running on blockchain networks can execute the same transfers in minutes for a fraction of the cost. This is an immediate financial and material improvement for families in developing countries. Biden’s economists attended “dozens of meetings” and were apparently unimpressed. One wonders if they spoke to any of the people these tools serve.
Beyond remittances, blockchain technology underpins a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications. Fidelity, JPMorgan, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Mastercard, Meta, Stripe, Block Inc. and Franklin Templeton are actively building on top of blockchain infrastructure. The claim by Biden economists that no “giant tech companies” are using this technology is flatly wrong.
The informative hook of the opinion article is the fall in the price of bitcoin. Using short-term price movements to condemn an entire asset class is not analytically serious. Amazon shares fell 94 percent from their peak during the dot-com crisis. By the Cummings-Bernstein standard, it should have been discarded as “fundamentally useless.” Volatility is a characteristic of nascent markets, not proof of futility.
Additionally, 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. Third parties or intermediaries cannot veto or reverse peer-to-peer transactions, unilaterally confiscate users’ funds, or alter your distributed ledger. That is why it is used around the world in areas where governments attack ordinary citizens. 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 policymaker (or crypto participant) has proposed anything of the sort. The stablecoin legislation Cummings and Bernstein reference creates fully reserved payment instruments that are overcollateralized with the most liquid government bonds on the planet. The Trump administration’s bitcoin reserve proposal does not involve new taxpayer spending.
Meanwhile, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, the Biden administration authorized extraordinary measures to guarantee all deposits. Their concern about moral hazard was apparently very selective.
The op-ed devotes considerable space to political donations from the crypto industry, implying corruption. The suggestion that an industry that advocates for 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 could start by examining their own side of the aisle during the Biden Administration, when Bankman-Fried donated overwhelmingly to Democrats.
The Biden administration had a historic opportunity to establish the United States as a global leader in digital asset regulation: draft clear, fair rules that protected consumers while allowing innovation to flourish on American soil. Instead, it chose to weaponize the banking system against a legal industry, creating a lose-lose situation for innovation, consumer protection, and the American crypto ecosystem.
Cummings and Bernstein write that cryptocurrency boosters “have run out of excuses.” Instead, it is the Biden administration’s cryptocurrency haters who owe the public an explanation.
