President Donald Trump’s negotiators on the US Senate’s crypto market structure bill are refusing to pass legislation that directly goes after the president over his business ties to digital assets, one of the main points Democrats have demanded in talks over how the US industry should be governed.
Some of the previous proposals for the bill’s ethics provisions, especially those proposed by Senator Adan Schiff of California, were “completely outrageous,” Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk TV in an interview Tuesday at the Ondo Summit in New York.
“We have made it clear that there are red lines,” he said. “We are not going to allow the president to be attacked individually or his family members.”
He said he’s hopeful that Democrats will come up with more reasonable versions “that feel a little bit closer to something that could ultimately be agreed upon.” And he said he believes a solution will be found.
“But at the end of the day, this is not an ethics bill,” he said.
Witt led a meeting of crypto policy experts and U.S. banking industry representatives on Monday, where digital asset experts were left frustrated that bankers had not yet come to the table to offer a way forward in their disagreements over the performance of stablecoins.
He told CoinDesk that the meeting “exposed some new areas of agreement,” but the White House is trying to thread the needle among bankers concerned about protecting their own deposit businesses and clearing the way for stablecoin products.
“We are trying to reach an agreement,” he said. “My number one job is to get a bill to the president’s desk. He wants it passed.”
But it’s Senate Democrats who may pose the tougher sell at this stage, as they continue to push for limits on cryptocurrency for top government officials, along with other important requests.
Under previous proposals that would have limited government officials’ spouses’ involvement in the industry, “a lot of senators’ wives and husbands would have maybe been out of work because of that,” Witt said.
Democrats met with industry representatives on Jan. 16, two days after a Senate Banking Committee hearing on advancing the legislation failed. And Democratic lawmakers plan to meet again Wednesday to continue talking about their approach, according to a person briefed on the plans. If they can’t agree to a compromise bill in the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation may have to advance with support only from Republicans, as a similar version already did in the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Ultimately, however, the legislation will have to have significant Democratic support to pass the Senate, which typically requires a 60-vote majority to pass a bill. The White House directed industry experts to put together their compromise ideas by the end of February, according to people familiar with the discussion. The longer this legislative process drags on, the more difficult it will be to pass a bill before Congress goes out to campaign for this year’s midterm elections.
Witt was also asked Tuesday if he would be willing to identify how many cryptocurrencies the U.S. government currently holds, an especially relevant figure in light of the ongoing presidential plan to establish federal reserves.
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to get into that.”
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