The House Passed It. The Senate Might Kill It.
The Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act (H.R. 1919) cleared the House 219-210 on July 17, 2025. That was during "Crypto Week" -- the same sprint that sent the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act moving through Congress.
Getting it through the Senate is a different problem entirely.
Senate leadership has signaled the CBDC ban is "unlikely to survive" their version of the legislation. The Senate's crypto priorities are the GENIUS Act (done) and CLARITY Act (pending). A digital dollar prohibition creates political complications some moderates want to avoid.
Speaker Mike Johnson found a workaround on the House side: he attached the CBDC ban to FISA Section 702 reauthorization -- the surveillance authority that lets the NSA collect communications without individual warrants. Conservative holdouts who opposed the surveillance bill flipped when Johnson added the CBDC prohibition. That's the legislative record: America's CBDC ban was used as a sweetener to pass warrantless surveillance authority.
The bill's language matters specifically for Bitcoin. It protects "open, permissionless, and private dollar-denominated currencies" -- language that describes Bitcoin's architecture directly. A CBDC would be its opposite: trackable, controllable, revocable.
Senator Ted Cruz has a Senate companion bill: S. 1124, currently sitting in Senate Banking Committee. His argument is simple: no government should have the ability to monitor every transaction a citizen makes.
If Senate leadership strips the CBDC ban from any merged legislation, Cruz's bill becomes the last line of defense.