The Debanking Scandal Started in Washington, Not Wall Streethttps://townhall.com/columnists/ej-antoni/2026/10/17/the-debanking-scandal-started-in-washington-not-wall-street-n2684846The 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. ...
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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. ...
Unless bureaucrats abusing their authority receive consequences, they will abuse again.
