The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is investigating several large banks, while the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is considering further rules to prevent future politically and ideologically motivated debanking.
The OCC announcement came after the release of its 47-page report, "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans," on October 14, 2026, which looked into the practices of nine major US banks.
These are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO Bank.
The review of their reputation risk policies and practices, covering the period between 2020 and September 2025, showed that all of them had rules that put account holders at risk of being debanked over their political or religious beliefs, affiliations, or lawful business. Some of the banks did, in fact, close accounts for these reasons.
The review was done under President Trump's August 7, 2025 executive order, which was aimed at preventing "politicized or unlawful debanking."
The OCC went through nearly 100,000 complaints, hundreds of individual bank decisions, and about 420,000 pages of bank documents to compile the report.
The broad reputation risk policies of the banks under investigation lacked clear standards and objective, risk-based criteria, the report said, adding that this led to subjective decision-making and inconsistency in how policies were applied.
The industries that faced restrictions, based on the banks' policies, were oil and gas, coal, firearms, detention facilities and private prisons, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and digital assets (issuers, exchanges, administrators).
These restrictions were often introduced "based primarily on how it might appear to the public if the bank provided access to financial services to these sectors," the report states. To assess this, banks relied on negative news searches and "the opinions of advocacy organizations."
The OCC had no way of knowing the full scope of the problem it was investigating, because, as it said, it was "unable to quantify on a comprehensive basis the full extent of debanking."
Nor did the report mention any specific case of crypto-related debanking.
It did give several examples of how the banks' reputation risk policies affected account holders.
In February 2021, JPMorgan's payment processor WePay closed the account of a merchant selling Trump and MAGA merchandise, deciding that the goods "promote[d] hate, violence, or racial intolerance." An employee explained this decision by saying, "we closed their account due to violating our WePay's Terms of Services (MAGA and Trump-related items are part of it)."
In September 2021, WePay's red flags on another seller included a "Biden-Illegitimate-Tshirt" and "The-Big-Lie-Sticker."
After the fact, a bank reputation risk employee said, "[t]here is no set criteria to indicate if A, B, or C word is found to be considered as hate or racism or terrorism, etc."
In June 2021, WePay closed the account of a nonprofit because employees labeled it as a "[r]ight wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric."
The decision to escalate this case was based on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeling the group as an "extremist hate group."
A JPMorgan Chase reputation risk employee said at the time, "from a Reputation Risk perspective, we would recommend an exit from this account." Two years later, another employee removed the words "right wing" and "religious" from the bank's records.
In late 2021, PNC refused a line of credit to a media company because of a speech by one of its owners, described as "a conservative political commentator," and another owner's foundation that "has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center."
A bank employee was cited in the report as saying, "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values."
A religious nonprofit lost its account after a card network sent Wells Fargo a list of about 60 merchants. When the bank asked the payment processor serving the nonprofit to check it for "hate, violence, harassment, or abuse," it was told it was not, and the processor decided to keep it as a client. Wells Fargo then sent the processor a third-party website that described the nonprofit's views on same-sex marriage and asked if that "change[d] their stance." The account was terminated with immediate effect.
In 2024, Wells Fargo was considering a new client in the firearms industry, but an employee noted: "[u]nder the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry."
OCC Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould said that the report provides "irrefutable evidence that the nation's largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses."
Noting that some banks have since removed or relaxed restrictions on some of the industries mentioned, such as firearms, tobacco, and digital assets, Gould said he was "not confident" that this was enough to prevent future debanking.
The report itself noted that "changes in the wording of policies do not always correspond with changes in practice" – and that "no bank has fully and publicly acknowledged its past debanking decisions."
The CFPB is now on the case, with Acting Director Mark Paoletta saying, "The CFPB will fully investigate whether the institutions featured in OCC's report and others have complied with federal consumer financial laws and take appropriate action."
On April 7, 2026, the OCC and the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) published a final rule that bars bank examiners from criticizing or acting against a bank on the basis of reputation risk, and from pushing a bank to close an account over "political, social, cultural, or religious views or beliefs, constitutionally protected speech."
The OCC report covers only banks under its supervision, while the executive order that prompted it left out of its scope payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe. The report itself says that card networks were "largely beyond the scope of this review" - yet the case involving Wells Fargo and the religious nonprofit started with a card network's list.
A bank account is the entry ticket to lawful economic life and to funding speech. The policies the OCC report analyzed and criticized in essence allow bank staff to decide who gets that ticket and who doesn't, based on their own interpretation of what the public might think.
The report shows that these policies were in some cases rewritten, but it also notes that it cannot say the practice is gone. And the payment networks that started one of the cases were not even reviewed.
