US Senate passes 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, 85-5, with CBDC ban through 2030

The US Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on June 22, 2026, by a vote of 85-5. The bill bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency, directly or through an intermediary, until the end of 2030. It now goes back to the House for concurrence on Senate amendments before heading to President Trump's desk.

The CBDC language was attached to a much larger housing-supply package — a vehicle few senators were going to vote against in an election year. It cleared with the kind of bipartisan margin that earlier standalone anti-CBDC bills never reached.

What the prohibition says

The operative section bars the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the regional Federal Reserve banks from issuing or creating a "central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency, directly or indirectly through a financial institution or other intermediary."

Two structural details matter:

• Sunset. The ban expires at the end of 2030 unless Congress renews it. This is a four-year freeze, not a permanent prohibition.
• Stablecoin carve-out. Privately issued stablecoins are explicitly outside the scope of the ban. Issuers operating under the federal stablecoin framework — Circle's USDC, Paxos-issued tokens, the new bank-issued stablecoins authorized after the GENIUS-style legislation — keep their lane.

The text closely tracks the standalone No CBDC Act (S.464) that Senator Ted Cruz reintroduced in the 119th Congress, which never reached a floor vote on its own. Folding it into housing legislation was the path.

Where it stands in the pipeline

• House (May 2026): earlier version of the housing package passed 396-13.
• Senate (June 22, 2026): 85-5, with CBDC text added.
• House (next): must concur on the Senate-amended text before final passage. Leadership is signaling a vote within days.
• White House: Trump campaigned on a CBDC ban and signed a 2025 executive order to the same effect for executive-branch agencies. A signature here is the expected next step, which turns the executive-branch posture into statute through 2030.

Numbers

• Senate vote: 85-5
• House vote (prior version): 396-13
• Ban duration: through December 31, 2030
• Excluded: privately issued stablecoins, including those operating under federal authorization
• Source for the operative text: bill summary on Congress.gov for the housing package, mirrored against the No CBDC Act (S.464) language

Impact

For the Fed, the immediate effect is procedural: pilots, working-group output, and the cross-border wholesale-CBDC research Boston Fed and the New York Innovation Center have published over the last several years can continue as research, but no production retail or wholesale CBDC instrument can ship before 2031. The Atlanta Fed's recent retail-CBDC technical paper joins that pile.

For stablecoin issuers, the carve-out is the load-bearing element. With the digital-dollar lane closed for four years and the federal stablecoin licensing regime now operational, the private-rail settlement use cases that Mastercard, Visa and the Stripe-Visa-Mastercard-Coinbase consortium have moved on through 2026 keep their runway. The Mastercard stablecoin settlement expansion to eight chains on June 12 and the consortium stablecoin announced earlier in the month sit on the same side of this line.

For the cross-border view: the EU's digital-euro file has just cleared the ECON committee and is in trilogue; China's e-CNY is in expanded pilot; the Bank of England published its draft stablecoin rules on June 23. The US is now the outlier among G7 monetary authorities — not on stablecoin regulation, where it now has a framework, but on the central-bank instrument itself.

What to watch

1. House concurrence vote. A second House vote on the Senate-amended text. The 396-13 prior margin makes opposition unlikely, but the housing-policy floor managers — not the crypto caucus — drive the schedule.
2. The signature. A Rose Garden signing would be the formal closing of the digital-dollar lane through 2030. Watch for any signing-statement language that narrows or broadens the operative text.
3. Cross-border CBDC research. The Fed's continued participation in BIS-coordinated mBridge-style work is research, not issuance. Expect that to continue — the statutory line is at "issue or create."
4. State-level action. Several states have already passed their own anti-CBDC laws covering UCC treatment. A federal four-year freeze does not preempt those; the patchwork stays.
5. 2030. The sunset clause is the real story here. Whoever holds Congress in 2030 controls whether the freeze renews or lapses.

Context

This is the fourth time since 2022 that the US has tried to legislate a federal CBDC ban — and the first time it passes the Senate. The earlier vehicles (the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, the No CBDC Act, the various FY-budget riders) either died in committee, lost the House by partisan margins, or got dropped at conference. The housing-bill vehicle changed the math: 85 senators did not become anti-CBDC overnight; they became unwilling to be the vote that tanked a bipartisan housing package.

The pattern across this site over the last month — the BoE stablecoin policy statement on June 23, the ECON committee vote on the digital euro the same week, MiCA's June 30 transitional deadline closing on EEA-unlicensed CASPs — all of these are the same underlying question being answered differently in each jurisdiction: where does the central-bank instrument stop and where do private stablecoins start? The Senate just drew that line for the US through the end of 2030.