The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has confirmed what conservatives have said for years. The OCC's 47-page report, released Wednesday after reviewing 100,000 complaints and 50,000 internal bank records, found that between 2020 and 2025 the nation’s nine largest national banks denied service to Americans because of their political, social, or religious beliefs.
The details are ugly. JPMorgan’s WePay payment unit closed the account of a merchant selling “MAGA” themed merchandise, and its screening system flagged phrases like “America First.” It shut down a religious non-profit because the Southern Poverty Law Center, since indicted on federal fraud charges, had branded it a hate group.
PNC refused a line of credit to a media company because one owner’s foundation had funded Christian conservative groups. Banks also choked off financing to entire lawful industries like firearms, coal, Arctic oil and gas, private prisons, tobacco, etc. While the instinct is to blame the banks, a different culprit emerges in the report’s details.
Banks feared negative press, protests, and organized activist criticism. But the greatest fear was reprisals from regulators and politicians, because those can actually shut down a financial institution.
A Wells Fargo review of a prospective firearms client was blunt: under the Biden administration, banks could face “greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry.” Another bank dropped private-prison clients citing “changing policymaker attitudes,” then tried to win one back just months into the Trump administration.
Those aren’t the actions of institutions pursuing an ideological crusade but of businesses reading the weather in Washington. That’s the real scandal in the OCC report.
Banks don’t operate in a free market so much as under the permanent supervision of federal examiners who can downgrade their ratings, initiate expensive investigations, and impose costly enforcement actions.
For years, those examiners graded banks on “reputational risk,” a category with no financial definition or objective yardstick. While a loan defaulting is a pass-or-fail course, reputational risk is whatever a regulator wants it to be, with no financial impact required.
A deposit account for a pro-life ministry poses no inherent danger to a bank’s balance sheet. Neither does a loan to a firearms manufacturer or payment services for a conservative think tank. But when the regulators who effectively control your fate hate those groups, a threatening phone call from the government can result in debanking.
That’s how faceless bureaucrats circumnavigate the Constitution. Officials who could never lawfully seize a disfavored group’s money can simply make it costly for banks to hold it. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that tactic in NRA v. Vullo in 2024, holding that regulators may not coerce the firms they oversee into punishing protected speech. Yet the practice persisted, because it rarely leaves fingerprints.
For those who believe in free markets and individual liberty, debanking was doubly offensive because it wasn’t a market failure but a regulatory distortion. Left to sound financial judgment, banks have every reason to serve profitable, lawful customers. It took government pressure to make turning away business look like the safe choice.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has acted. Its August 2025 executive order directed regulators to end politicized debanking, and the OCC has stopped using reputational risk in examinations. But executive orders and agency guidance can be reversed on the first day of the next administration. Another far-left White House could revive reputational risk, restore the quiet phone calls, and start the cycle over.
Congress ought to step up and make that impossible by enshrining into law protections for bank customers and the banks themselves so that the latter cannot be unconstitutionally coerced by regulators. Federal law should prohibit non-financial and nonsensical metrics like reputational risk from supervision and forbid officials from pressuring institutions to drop lawful customers without a documented, quantifiable financial reason.
Rules like that don’t expand government but restrain it, keeping regulators focused on safety and soundness, not their private political preferences.
Furthermore, whatever standards must apply evenly. Fintechs, payment processors, and other non-bank firms are increasingly providing the deposit and payment services Americans use every day. It’s no accident that WePay, a payment platform, produced some of the report’s worst examples.
If those firms are exempt, politicized gatekeeping just migrates to the less-regulated, and fast-growing, corner of the market. Firms offering the same services must play by the same rules.
Americans should never have to wonder whether their bank account depends on their politics. The debanking pressure came from Washington, and the fix has to come from Washington too, written into law where the next administration can’t quietly undo it.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist and the Richard Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
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