The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Development Committee included a provision temporarily prohibiting the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency in its bipartisan bill to boost U.S. housing.
The “21st Century Housing Pathway Act,” introduced Monday by committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, respectively the committee’s top Republican and Democrat, aims to make it easier to build housing in the United States.
“This bill is not only about reducing regulatory bureaucracy, reducing costs, and expanding housing supply without generating new spending, it is also about ensuring that people like the single mother who raised me in North Charleston, South Carolina, have even greater access to economic opportunity and the American dream of homeownership,” Scott said in a statement.
“The package includes the vast majority of the ROAD to Housing Act, unanimously supported by the Senate, incorporates bipartisan housing ideas from the House, and takes a good first step in stopping corporate landlords who are driving families out of homeownership,” Warren said in her own statement.
Neither legislator mentioned the ban on CBDCs, which takes up just two pages in the 303-page bill. Lawmakers have included the ban in previous bills, and the House of Representatives passed it as a stand-alone bill last year, but it has so far failed to advance to Congress.
“Except as provided in subsection (c), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or a Federal Reserve bank may not issue or create a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency directly or indirectly through a financial institution or other intermediary,” the section says.
It included a sunset provision for Dec. 31, 2030, and created an exception for permissionless “dollar-denominated” private currencies that “fully preserve the privacy protections” of physical currency.
The White House released an “Administrative Policy Statement” supporting the bill, explicitly endorsing the CBDC provision in the two-paragraph statement.
“The Administration highlights the inclusion of presidential priorities… to stop the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency that could be [sic] represent significant threats to privacy and personal freedom,” the statement said.
