US Treasury Silent After Deadline
Two months after US President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR), the US Treasury Department has missed its most consequential deadline yet, declining to release—or even acknowledge—the mandated evaluation that was due yesterday.
The March 6 executive order directed Treasury Secretary David Bessent to submit, “within 60 days of the date of this order, … an evaluation of the legal and investment considerations for establishing and managing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile going forward, including the accounts in which the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile should be located and the need for any legislation to operationalize any aspect of this order or the proper management and administration of such accounts.”
As of this morning, no such document appears on the Treasury’s website, no statement has been released to the press, and congressional staff on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees confirm that nothing has been transmitted to their offices.
Trump Administration Again Silent On Bitcoin Reserve
Yesterday’s silence echoes a previous lapse: the order also required that “within 30 days of the date of this order, each agency shall review its authorities to transfer any Government BTC held by it to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and shall submit a report reflecting the result of that review to the Secretary of the Treasury.” The 30-day mark passed on April 5 without any public disclosure. Whether the inter-agency audits were completed, consolidated, or even initiated remains unknown because the order does not compel publication.
Lacking official updates, the only public window into the process has come from David Bailey, chief executive of BTC Inc. and a long-time confidant of Trump on digital-asset matters. In a post dated April 16, Bailey wrote that the Bitcoin audit was “not done yet, a few agencies requested more time and should be done in roughly a week.”
Bailey has since tempered expectations that any audit results will see daylight. “I’ve never said it’ll be publicly released, I expect it to be commented on,” he said in an April 16 exchange on X. His stance echoes earlier remarks in which he suggested the reserve would function as a “digital Fort Knox,” a phrase that White House crypto czar David Sacks also used in the administration’s initial messaging.
The question now is whether yesterday’s 60-day evaluation will follow the same path into administrative quietude. The executive order does not explicitly require the evaluation—or any subsequent Treasury recommendation—to be made public.
At press time, BTC traded at $94,418.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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