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A morning soundbite from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent briefly rattled Bitcoin and crypto markets on Thursday before a late-day clarification restored the policy baseline: the United States won’t be sellers, and “budget-neutral” options to grow the country’s bitcoin stockpile remain on the table. Senator Cynthia Lummis swiftly framed the endpoint. “America needs the BITCOIN Act,” she wrote, calling the legislation the operative blueprint for expanding a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve without tapping taxpayers.
In a Fox Business hit that ricocheted across X, Bessent said the government is “not going to be buying” additional bitcoin and added, “We’re going to stop selling that,” referencing a reserve he valued between $15 billion and $20 billion. Markets faded into the statement; by mid-day, bitcoin was off roughly 3.7%. The point that stuck—“we’re not going to be buying”—was clipped and shared widely, but it was only half the story.
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Hours later, Bessent posted a clarifying note. “Bitcoin that has been finally forfeited to the federal government will be the foundation of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that President Trump established in his March Executive Order,” he wrote. “In addition, Treasury is committed to exploring budget-neutral pathways to acquire more Bitcoin to expand the reserve, and to execute on the President’s promise to make the United States the ‘Bitcoin superpower of the world.’” The course correction aligned his comments with the administration’s March directive and the policy discussion that has matured since.
Bitcoin Act Is Still The Way Forward
Lummis, chair of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets, seized the moment to underline the fiscal constraint. “Secretary Scott Bessent is right: a budget-neutral path to building SBR is the way. We cannot save our country from $37T debt by purchasing more bitcoin, but we can revalue gold reserves to today’s prices & transfer the increase in value to build SBR. America needs the BITCOIN Act.” In a separate reply to Bessent, she added: “I have a ₿ill for that.”
Her posts also flagged ongoing work “with Scott Bessent & Howard Lutnick to identify budget-neutral ways to continue growing our bitcoin reserve & outpacing adversaries in the race.”
The legal and administrative scaffolding for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was set five months ago. On March 6, President Trump signed an executive order creating the SBR and a separate US Digital Asset Stockpile, directing agencies to capitalize the reserve with Bitcoin “finally forfeited” to the government and to develop budget-neutral strategies for further acquisition.
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Lummis’s “BITCOIN Act” would take that framework from executive policy to statute and goes considerably further. The latest text lays out a five-year purchase program authorizing up to 200,000 BTC per year—1,000,000 BTC in total—paired with a 20-year minimum holding period and a quarterly, public cryptographic proof-of-reserves regime.
Where Bessent’s remarks intersect—and diverge—with that legislative ambition is gold. In March, he downplayed a formal revaluation of US gold as a credible budget lever, even as the broader policy conversation around the asset side of the federal balance sheet intensified. On Thursday, Bessent told Fox Business that a gold revaluation is “unlikely.” Lummis, by contrast, is explicitly proposing to mark gold to market in order to seed the SBR without new borrowing—an idea that has migrated from think-piece fodder to bill text but still faces macro, legal, and central-bank-independence scrutiny.
The bottom line is that Thursday did not mark a policy reversal so much as a restatement of sequencing. The executive branch will build the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve first with finally forfeited coins and, per Bessent’s clarification, is actively evaluating budget-neutral ways to expand it.
At press time, BTC traded at $118,751.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
