Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts and ranking member of Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve on Wednesday to confirm that they will not “use taxpayer dollars to bail out cryptocurrency billionaires and other highly leveraged cryptocurrency investors.”
The Massachusetts Democrat’s request to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell came as bitcoin continued a slide that has seen the popular cryptocurrency drop in value by nearly 60% since hitting a high in October.
Warren, in a letter to Bessent and Powell about a potential bailout, warned that it not only “would be deeply unpopular to transfer wealth from American taxpayers to cryptocurrency billionaires, it could also directly enrich President [Donald] Trump and his family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.”
She noted that both the Treasury Department and the Fed have authorities that empower them to give financial support to banks and other entities during a financial crisis.
“Concerningly, at a recent hearing, in an exchange regarding his authority to bail out the cryptocurrency industry, Secretary Bessent was asked whether ‘the money of our taxpayers … is … going to be deployed into crypto assets,’ ” Warren wrote, referring to the secretary’s testimony on Feb. 6 to the House Financial Services Committee.
“Rather than giving a simple ‘no,’ he deflected, stating that ‘[w]e are retaining seized bitcoin,’ ” Warren wrote. “It’s deeply unclear what, if any, plans the U.S. government currently has to intervene in the current Bitcoin selloff.”
