Former CFTC Chair: U.S. CBDC Being Explored Behind Closed Doors Despite Trump Pledge

Former CFTC chair says U.S. CBDC is coming despite Senate ban vote

May 20, 2026

Timothy Massad, who chaired the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014 to 2017, said Tuesday that a U.S. central bank digital currency is being explored behind closed doors — a direct conflict with President Trump's public pledge to ban one and the Senate's 89-10 vote in March to do exactly that.

Massad spoke on the record to CoinDesk at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London. He described a U.S. digital dollar as ultimately inevitable, pointing to BIS Project Agora — a multilateral initiative on tokenized cross-border settlement that includes Federal Reserve participation — as evidence that government-backed digital settlement infrastructure is already in development, however it gets labeled publicly.

Mark Gould, the Federal Reserve's Chief Payments Executive, was at the same event. When asked directly about a digital dollar, Gould said a CBDC is "not under our remit." But pressed on who would own a government-backed digital dollar if one were created, he confirmed it would fall to the Fed — a careful answer that acknowledged the institutional reality without endorsing the policy.

The legislative picture is unresolved. The Senate passed its CBDC prohibition 89-10 this March, one of the most bipartisan votes on any crypto-adjacent issue this year. The ban is embedded in a housing bill that still needs to clear the House; it is not yet law.

Massad's argument centers on competitive pressure. European institutions are moving: a euro stablecoin consortium is forming, and BIS is running multi-CBDC experiments in parallel. The U.S. is a Project Agora member country. Whether or not the Trump administration calls what it develops a "CBDC," Massad's position is that the infrastructure question cannot be avoided indefinitely.

The contradiction the summit exposed is structural: the administration's public posture is a ban, but the institution that would operate a digital dollar is already participating in the international settlement architecture that would require one.