Kids these days will never appreciate the insane math skills it took to split a dinner bill between six friends who all ordered different things and were carrying nothing but cash.
Today, it’s never been easier. One guy picks up the check, and everybody else Venmos him. You can also PayPal your tattoo artist, use Cash App to donate to a buddy’s GoFundMe, or settle accounts with your kids’ babysitter on Zelle.
That’s what tech innovation is supposed to do: take an aspect of life that was awkward or difficult and make it totally frictionless.
During his four years as president, Joe Biden tried his hardest to put the breaks on this financial technology revolution. If the Biden administration had its way, all those simple, everyday transactions would’ve come under the watchful eye of Washington bureaucrats.
Under Biden, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is already arguably unconstitutional as it is, tried to extend its power even further by regulating payment apps the same way it regulates banks. If successful, this would have meant new, heavy rules on how these apps operate — slowing down transactions, raising costs, and adding piles of red tape. The CFPB’s objective? Turning simple transactions into a bureaucratic nightmare so that the American people would use Venmo and Cash App less and the U.S. dollar more, giving the federal government more control over the U.S. financial system.
And that’s on top of the IRS’s decision to drop the reporting threshold for payment app transactions from $20,000 to just $600. This, of course, was a massive expansion of government surveillance, exposing the transaction details of far more Americans to Big Brother and dragging thousands of side-hustlers, gig workers, and small business owners into endless, intrusive audits they didn’t sign up for.
It’s true what they say about how the government views business — if it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it.
Thankfully, President Trump just stepped in and shut both policies down.
Thanks largely to vote whipping efforts from the president himself, the House of Representatives recently passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which repeals the IRS Venmo rule. The Senate is now considering the legislation. That same day, President Trump also signed a resolution killing the Biden-era rule that gave the CFPB more power to regulate digital payment systems.
They called it “consumer protection,” but it was never about protecting us. It was about controlling us. Biden’s bureaucrats saw a booming new part of the economy they didn’t yet have their hands on, and they wanted to bend it to their will.
Biden’s attacks on Americans’ financial freedom didn’t stop at Venmo. He also pushed for a government-run digital dollar, or “FedCoin,” designed to chip away at private, decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to give Washington more control over every transaction you make. This would have undermined financial privacy and resurrected the U.S. dollar’s monopoly over the American financial system. Trump stood firmly against this, championing cryptocurrencies as a way for Americans to reclaim financial freedom. His powerful speech at last summer’s Bitcoin conference rallied the crypto community behind him.
The Biden Justice Department also targeted Visa last year, filing an antitrust lawsuit against the company’s debit business. While going after big companies is the right instinctual move, populist conservatives and Federalist Society legal professionals oppose this case because it looks more like a socialist push to stop private sector control in the financial services industry than addressing real harm. Visa competes with countless payment options, from other debit companies to fintech apps like Venmo, and federal law already mandates that each card use two debit networks, so there is no chance of a monopoly here. Yet the financial control-obsessed Biden administration went after the company anyway.
If Biden had his way, you and your old college buddies would still be spending 20 minutes divvying up the check at Buffalo Wild Wings, all to appease the Biden administration’s obsession with ensuring federal control over Americans’ payment transactions. President Trump, on the other hand, understands that innovation is freedom, and freedom is what keeps America great. By cutting through the bureaucracy and standing up for fintech, he is ensuring Americans get to keep their money moving fast, easy, and free of government interference.
That’s the kind of leadership that keeps America winning.
Lynn Westmoreland was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2004 until 2016. He served on the Financial Services Committee and its Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.
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