Sponsors (2)
The bill increases Americans' financial privacy and reduces reporting burdens for firms and small sellers, but it does so at the cost of making law‑enforcement and regulatory oversight harder, raising implementation and litigation risks, and limiting future payments innovation.
Bank customers, investors, and ordinary Americans gain stronger financial privacy and statutory Fourth Amendment protections: federal access to bank and transaction records is narrowed (warrant requirement/statutory privacy right), unlawful disclosures carry criminal penalties, and some centralized market-data collection is limited.
Financial institutions, broker-dealers, and small sellers face reduced reporting and regulatory burdens as many BSA/CAT reporting obligations are repealed or narrowed and third‑party settlement reporting thresholds are raised, lowering ongoing administrative and compliance costs.
Broker-dealers and member firms will receive reimbursement of CAT fees previously collected, returning funds to market participants.
Law enforcement and national-security efforts will face higher barriers and lose tools (narrowed access to records, eliminated special‑measures and CAT), potentially slowing investigations into crime, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and market abuse.
Individuals, financial institutions, and agencies may incur increased litigation and transitional compliance costs as long‑standing reporting regimes are repealed, definitions change, and new civil/criminal liability rules are added, creating legal uncertainty during implementation.
Shifting final approval of significant agency rules to Congress risks delaying or blocking health, safety, environmental, and social‑service protections and politicizing technical rulemaking, harming beneficiaries and increasing uncertainty for state/local governments and businesses.
Based on analysis of 16 sections of legislative text.
Introduced February 27, 2025 by Mike Lee · Last progress February 27, 2025
Restricts government access to individual financial records so that most access requires a search warrant, removes many Bank Secrecy Act reporting, recordkeeping, and special‑measures authorities, and creates new criminal and civil penalties for unlawful access. It also orders the SEC to terminate the Consolidated Audit Trail, bars the Federal Reserve from issuing or holding a central bank digital currency for individuals, changes congressional review and scoring rules for certain agency regulations, raises third‑party payment reporting thresholds, and protects individuals’ use of convertible virtual currency and self‑hosted wallets from agency bans. The bill affects financial institutions, federal agencies, securities market surveillance, tax reporting for third‑party network transactions, and cryptocurrency users; it replaces several existing enforcement and disclosure mechanisms with warrant and constitutional‑standard protections and creates new remedies and criminal penalties for violations.