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The executive order to build President Donald Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has awaited congressional action, and sources say there's one idea left for 2026.

What to know:
President Donald Trump's administration has determined that it needs congressional action to open the planned Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, so his executive order and forming it has now waited a year for action.People familiar with the legislative effort have said that a late-year defense bill may offer a potential landing spot for 2026.

President Donald Trump's move to establish what he called a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" within the federal government was greeted with crypto-sector celebration at the start of his administration. The industry cheered it as further cementing the arrival of bitcoin $BTC as a mature asset, but a year has passed, and there's still no reserve.

Trump's administration performed the initial job of accounting for the government's crypto holdings, but the U.S. bitcoin reserve is no closer to forming because of the outcome of one concept in the March 6, 2025, order: "the need for any legislation to operationalize any aspect of this order." Trump's Treasury Department lacks the needed authorizations for building the specialized accounts. That requires action from Congress, the White House has acknowledged, with Trump's crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, saying the situation presents "novel legal questions" that must be answered.

Lawmakers such as Senator Cynthia Lummis have pitched reserve legislation, and the current best chance for passage, according to people familiar with the legislative strategy, may be to get it into the National Defense Authorization Act at the end of the year. But Trump's White House would probably have to re-adopt the issue as a priority cause in order to make that happen.

Conjecture about the planning and funding of the reserve — and its cousin, a separate digital assets stockpile also ordered by Trump to gather every other type of cryptocurrency — has ebbed and flowed. Last month, CNBC markets talking head Jim Cramer spouted a rumor that Trump's people were poised to start filling the reserve when $BTC hit $60,000, despite the lack of a place to put it or money to buy it with.

The president's crypto officials continue to demur when asked how much bitcoin the feds actually possess, though some estimates put it at more than 300,000, totalling more than $20 billion.

The major disappointment from the crypto sector about Trump's bitcoin order was that it didn't come with any new government purchases of the leading crypto asset. It instead encouraged creative policies that would allow the government to add to the stockpile without spending taxpayer dollars.

Witt, Trump's adviser, hasn't been willing to share the leading ideas for obtaining more bitcoin for the fund, which is meant to be held for long-term appreciation, not technically as a strategic reserve that would imply its contents would be released to mitigate any emergencies.

The White House didn't respond to a request for comment on the halt in progress, but it further underlines that executive orders — a mainstay of Trump's administration — don't have the power of law and often act as little more than a high-level steer from the president.

If Trump's congressional allies come up with a pitch for the reserve bill to be tucked into the defense bill later this year, that legislative process usually concludes in December. The must-pass funding bill is often used as what DC insiders like to call a "Christmas tree," a piece of legislation on which they hang a wide array of unrelated bill ornaments, because the package has to get passed. If that's the plan, it would happen in this session's "lame duck" period, the point at which some members of Congress will have been voted out of office or chosen to retire — like Lummis — but haven't yet come to their departure dates.

Lummis' own bitcoin reserve bill calls for a spending program that gets the U.S. to a holding of a million tokens — about 5% of the total eventual supply. The Wyoming Republican, who is the inaugural chair of the Senate Banking Committee's first digital assets subcommittee, has so far only managed to get the legislation into the committee, but the panel's major priority is another crypto matter: passing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

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