By Scott Simpson
Next week, the Senate Agriculture Committee will mark up legislation on digital assets and the future of crypto markets. Legislation that, if advanced, would be considered a significant win for President Trump’s economic and innovation agenda.
That progress reflects months of bipartisan work by committee members and staff who take seriously their responsibility to legislate carefully, deliberately, and squarely within the committee’s jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, Senator Roger Marshall is threatening to derail that work by attaching an interchange amendment that has nothing to do with crypto, nothing to do with agriculture, and nothing to do with the committee’s mandate.
This amendment, as currently proposed, is not germane. Attempting to force it into the Agriculture Committee’s markup is more than a procedural misstep, but a clear signal of disrespect for the committee, its members, and the legislative process itself.
While Senator Marshall’s proposal is being pitched as a significant rewrite of his original Credit Card Competition Act, which was endorsed by the President earlier this month, the newly proposed amendment is little more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing… a government price control by another name. The draft has been reworked to remove explicit references that would clearly place it under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Committee, but the intent behind those changes is transparent: to make a non-germane amendment appear procedurally acceptable through cosmetic edits alone. That is not how the Senate should function.
Regulatory Uncertainty
Even more concerning, the amendment expands the role of state attorneys general, injecting additional regulatory uncertainty and litigation risk into a financial services system that already faces growing complexity. This approach would fragment enforcement, undermine national standards, and further destabilize markets that millions of consumers and small businesses rely on every day.
Supporters of this legislation claim it will protect smaller financial institutions by rewriting how the $100-billion exemption is applied. We have heard this argument before and, unfortunately, history shows it does not hold up.
The broader harm caused by interchange mandates is undeniable and well documented. The Congressional Research Service, independent academics, and respected economists have all reached the same conclusion: price controls on interchange fees fail consumers and fail local financial institutions.
We have seen this all before. Senator Dick Durbin ran this same playbook more than a decade ago with his 2010 amendment on debit card interchange. Consumers lost free checking and community financial institutions were stripped of resources critical to serving their members. All while the largest corporate mega-stores, who promised lower prices, quietly pocketed the windfall.
The exemptions included in the 2010 Durbin Amendment were supposed to shield community banks and credit unions from harm. Despite their mission-driven, not-for-profit structure, credit unions still felt the consequences as price controls distorted the entire financial ecosystem. Costs and lost revenues were shifted onto credit unions, weakening the very institutions that exist to serve working families and local communities.
Effects Ripple Throughout The Financial Services System
That is because interchange mandates do not operate in isolation. Their effects ripple throughout the financial services system, reducing the resources credit unions rely on to offer affordable products, invest in fraud prevention, and serve their 145 million consumer-members. Rewriting exemption language does not change that fundamental reality.
There is no reason to believe the outcome will be any different this time.
In fact, the stakes are even higher. If enacted, these mandates would deliver a quarter-trillion-dollar hit to the U.S. economy and cost nearly 160,000 American jobs, according to the Electronic Payments Coalition. That is not reform, and certainly not the “win” President Trump would expect. It is a transparent attempt to reward the largest retailers in the country at the expense of consumers, workers, and the community-based financial institutions that support them.
The Senate Agriculture Committee should not be used as a vehicle for this kind of legislative end-run. Members of the Committee should reject Senator Marshall’s amendment outright if it is introduced and keep the committee focused on the work it was convened to do.
More broadly, Congress should reject this legislation altogether and instead work with credit unions to address affordability challenges in a way that actually helps consumers. That is what credit unions do and why they were founded, nearly a century ago, in the first place.
Respect for process matters. So does respect for the institutions that serve millions of Americans every day. This amendment deserves neither.
Scott Simpson is President/CEO of America's Credit Unions.