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Senior U.S. House Republican Says CBDCs Could Be ‘Weaponized’ as Political Tool
Majority Whip Tom Emmer is seeking to halt the Federal Reserve’s ability to issue a new digital dollar.
Updated Mar 9, 2023, 10:28 p.m. Published Mar 9, 2023, 9:47 p.m.
Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the number 3 Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, is campaigning to stop what he argues is the intent of President Joe Biden’s administration to set up a digital dollar that could be deployed to collect information about citizens’ financial lives.
Emmer – a staunch ally of the crypto industry he said “can be very threatening to unelected bureaucrats” – is pushing legislation that would block the U.S. Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The Treasury Department has encouraged work on a digital dollar, and the Fed is still in research mode on the project, officials have said as recently as this week.
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“Recent actions from the Biden administration make it clear that they’re not only itching to create a digital dollar, but they’re willing to trade Americans’ right to financial privacy for surveillance-style CBDC,” Emmer told an audience at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
He argued Thursday that a government token could easily be “weaponized into a surveillance tool,” and the U.S. government could “program a CBDC to choke out politically unpopular activity.”
Read More: Top US Treasury Official Says Leaders ‘Actively Evaluating’ Digital Dollar Question
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