Treasury and Commerce Are Fighting Over Who Gets to Run America’s Bitcoin Reserve

More than 16 months after President Donald Trump signed the executive order creating a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the government still hasn’t decided who is allowed to run it.

The Treasury and Commerce departments are now in open competition for control of the reserve, according to a Bloomberg report published Monday and citing people familiar with the internal discussions. At issue isn’t just bureaucratic turf. It’s a live legal question: whether Treasury actually has the statutory authority to hold and manage an asset as volatile as bitcoin on the government’s balance sheet at all.

That question wasn’t supposed to still be open. Trump’s Executive Order 14233, signed March 6, 2025, was explicit: the Treasury secretary would establish an office to administer the reserve, capitalized entirely with bitcoin forfeited through criminal and civil proceedings, with Commerce playing a supporting role on acquisition strategy. Agencies had 30 days to report their holdings. Treasury had 60 to deliver a full legal, custodial and legislative review. Bitcoin deposited into the reserve, the order said, “shall not be sold.”

Sixteen months on, none of that has produced a functioning reserve. The government hasn’t publicly finalized its full holdings, hasn’t acquired a single new coin under the policy, and now — per Bloomberg — is watching Commerce emerge as a genuine contender to take over primary oversight from Treasury. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has stepped in to referee, with the DOJ saying it is “working closely with both the Treasury and Commerce departments” to sort out what’s legally possible.

The White House, for its part, is sticking to the line that the project is still very much alive. Spokesperson Liz Huston said the administration “continues to examine the best structure for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and the associated U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile — language that commits to nothing on timeline or which department ultimately wins.

The volatility point is the crux of it. Federal agencies that hold reserve assets — gold, petroleum, pharmaceuticals — are typically managing things with either stable value or clear utility. Bitcoin is neither, and the executive order’s own “shall not be sold” clause compounds the problem: it commits the government to holding an asset that can move 50% in either direction with no exit valve, a mandate that sits awkwardly inside Treasury’s normal custodial framework. Commerce, whose secretary was already named as a co-author of the “budget-neutral” acquisition strategy under the original order, has become the administration’s fallback option as lawyers work through whether Treasury can legally do the job as written.

The dollar figures at stake are real. The U.S. currently holds 328,372 BTC, the largest known sovereign holding of any government — well ahead of China’s estimated 190,000 BTC and the U.K.’s roughly 61,000 BTC, according to tracking from BitcoinTreasuries and Arkham Intelligence. Bitcoin was trading near $63,600 on Wednesday morning after clawing back above $61,800 on softer U.S. jobs data and renewed Fed rate-cut expectations, putting the value of that stockpile at roughly $20.9 billion — down sharply from the roughly $25 billion it would have been worth at bitcoin’s October 2025 high near $126,000.

While the executive branch sorts out its internal jurisdiction fight, lawmakers have been trying to force the issue through statute. BNC has covered the American Reserve Modernization Act, or ARMA, introduced in May by Rep. Nick Begich (R-AK) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME). The bill would explicitly anchor the reserve inside Treasury, lock all federally held bitcoin for a minimum of 20 years unless it’s sold to pay down debt, and authorize purchases of up to 1 million BTC over five years — roughly 5% of total supply. White House digital assets adviser Patrick Witt has called ARMA “Version 2” of the earlier BITCOIN Act, and has said the administration wants the framework to be legally airtight before it moves.

That’s precisely the gap Bloomberg’s reporting exposes: an executive order that assigned Treasury the job without settling whether Treasury is legally equipped to do it, and a Congress that hasn’t yet passed the legislation that would resolve the question either way. Until one of those two tracks produces an answer, the reserve exists mostly on paper — a designated pool of forfeited bitcoin sitting under an unresolved custody arrangement.

Crypto industry reaction has stayed notably upbeat despite the delay and the Bitcoin price remains steady, but down.

Bitcoin is steady, Source: Brave New Coin

That framing lines up with what BNC has tracked on the corporate side of the ledger. Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, authorized bitcoin sales for the first time in June to fund its capital structure — a reminder that even the most committed “never sell” treasury programs eventually run into real-world liquidity constraints, the same tension now playing out at the federal level over whether a “shall not be sold” reserve is workable in practice.

For now, only El Salvador has a fully operational, actively purchasing national bitcoin reserve among the roughly 15 nation-states that hold BTC. The U.S., despite sitting on by far the largest government stockpile in the world, remains stuck deciding who’s allowed to hold the keys.