Sponsors (2)
Introduced February 27, 2025 by Mike Lee · Last progress February 27, 2025
The bill significantly strengthens individuals' financial-privacy and anti‑centralization protections and expands remedies for unlawful disclosures, but does so at the cost of reduced investigative and market‑surveillance capabilities, increased compliance and litigation burdens on banks (and possibly taxpayers), and limits on certain policy tools such as a Fed retail CBDC.
All bank customers and individuals gain stronger financial-privacy protections because federal access to bank and financial records will generally require warrant-supported processes and access that would violate the Fourth Amendment is explicitly barred.
Bank customers gain new legal remedies and deterrents (statutory damages, attorney's fees, injunctive relief, and criminal penalties for knowing violations), increasing accountability for unlawful disclosures of financial records.
All Americans' personally identifiable financial data faces a lower risk of large-scale central collection because the bill terminates the CAT and limits centralized databases, reducing the chance of mass exposure of identifying data.
Law enforcement, intelligence, and regulators will face higher legal hurdles and narrower authorities to access financial records and surveillance tools, weakening capabilities to investigate money laundering, fraud, terrorism, and other serious crimes.
Financial institutions face larger compliance burdens, record-retention obligations, and sharply increased litigation and liability risk (per-violation/day civil penalties, criminal exposure), which could raise costs for banks and be passed on to customers.
Terminating the CAT and removing certain surveillance authorities creates sudden regulatory and data gaps that will impair market surveillance and the ability to reconstruct trading activity, while triggering reimbursements and transitional litigation or administrative costs.
Based on analysis of 16 sections of legislative text.
Requires warrants for government access to bank records, removes many disclosure exceptions, ends the SEC's CAT, bans retail Fed CBDC, raises penalties, and raises payment‑processor reporting thresholds.
Tightens bank and financial privacy by requiring search warrants for government access to customer financial records, removes multiple statutory disclosure pathways, and creates stronger private remedies and criminal penalties for unlawful access or disclosure. It also orders the SEC to terminate the Consolidated Audit Trail, bans the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) or maintaining individual accounts, raises congressional review and scoring requirements for certain agency rules, raises third-party payment reporting thresholds, and forbids federal agencies from restricting individuals' use of convertible virtual currency or self-hosted wallets.