The House Financial Services Committee voted 28-21 along party lines on Monday to advance the American Reserve Modernization Act, a bill that would write President Trump’s 2025 executive order on a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve into federal law.
The vote sends H.R. 8957 to the full House with a path that did not exist a week ago. The bill, introduced in May by Representative Nick Begich of Alaska with Representative Jared Golden of Maine as a Democratic co-lead, would require the Treasury Department to establish a secure Bitcoin storage facility within 180 days of enactment, alongside a separate Digital Asset Stockpile for federally held non-Bitcoin tokens.
For the crypto industry, the vote matters less for what the reserve holds today than for what it signals. A standing committee of the House has now endorsed the idea that the United States government should treat Bitcoin as a strategic asset it keeps, the way it keeps gold or oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Two years ago that framing lived on the fringes of policy debate. On Monday it cleared committee on a roll call.
What the bill requires
Under the legislation, any Bitcoin the government acquires and deposits into the reserve must be held for at least 20 years from the date of deposit. Sales would be allowed only to reduce the national debt, and only after the holding period ends. The Treasury Secretary would run audits and security, consulting the Defense and Homeland Security departments, and would have to account for forks and airdrops that land on government-controlled addresses.
The bill also orders a study of budget-neutral ways to expand the reserve, an idea the administration has floated all year, and redirects part of the net earnings that Federal Reserve banks remit to the Treasury toward Bitcoin purchases. Annual reports to Congress would have to lay out the projected costs and benefits of acquisitions, with a detailed accounting of what each batch of coins cost and what the government expects from holding them.
| Provision | Detail |
|---|---|
| Reserve facility | Treasury must establish it within 180 days of enactment |
| Holding period | Minimum 20 years from deposit |
| Sales | Only to reduce the national debt, after the holding period |
| Stockpile | Separate custody for non-Bitcoin digital assets |
| Oversight | Treasury audits, annual reports to Congress |
| Security | Coordination with Defense and Homeland Security |
From executive order to statute
Trump created the reserve by executive order in March 2025, seeding it with roughly 198,000 bitcoins the federal government had seized in criminal cases and adding a stockpile of other confiscated digital assets. At current prices that stash is worth more than $16 billion, and it has sat in government wallets through a year in which the price ran from the $60,000s to above $86,000 in early September before settling back into the low $80,000s.
An executive order, though, lasts only as long as the administration that signed it. The bill’s sponsors argue that only a statute gives the holdings durability, and that codifying the reserve ends the practice of agencies auctioning seized coins case by case. Begich has framed the bill as a way to lock in what he calls a modern reserve strategy before a future administration reverses course.
An earlier House bill, the BITCOIN Act of 2025, went further: it directed Treasury to buy one million bitcoins over five years and let states store their own holdings in the reserve. ARMA drops the large-scale purchases and focuses on holdings the government already controls, which makes it an easier sell in a Congress wary of new spending. It keeps the spirit of the earlier bill, the 20-year lockup and the debt-reduction-only exit, while dropping the part that would have put the United States in the market as a buyer of last resort.
“Administrations have auctioned it off or held it in reserve, according to the whims of the executive branch. By creating a strategic reserve with the weight of law, the ARMA reinforces stability,” Begich said when he introduced the bill in May.
Where it stands politically
The committee margin was purely partisan: 28 Republicans in favor, 21 Democrats opposed. That says more about election-year positioning than about the full House, where Republicans hold a narrow majority and a handful of swing-district Democrats have backed crypto measures before. Senate prospects are harder to read. Last week the CLARITY Act, the broader market structure bill, failed a cloture vote in the Senate 49-50, leaving the reserve legislation as the main live vehicle for crypto policy in this Congress.
Ranking Member Maxine Waters has repeatedly called the reserve a giveaway to the president’s crypto associates and argued the government should stockpile assets with clear economic utility, not digital tokens. Democrats on the committee pressed for oversight language during the markup. Sponsors counter that the reserve requires no taxpayer money, that it draws on coins already in federal custody, and that any eventual sale would serve debt reduction rather than plug a budget gap.
Market reaction was muted. Bitcoin traded near $81,000 on Monday, up from below $76,000 late last week, and the vote produced no visible price move. Traders had largely priced in a favorable committee outcome once the markup was scheduled, and attention stayed on ETF flows, which ran close to $1 billion on Monday, the strongest single day of 2026 for US spot bitcoin funds.
The bill now needs a floor vote that House leadership has not scheduled. Even if the House passes it, the Senate arithmetic that sank CLARITY last week applies here too, and the midterms are seven weeks out. Still, the reserve bill is now the clearest test of whether this Congress can pass any crypto statute at all before voters go to the polls, and Monday’s 28-21 margin is the first hard datapoint on that question. A second datapoint, the full House vote, could come within weeks.