Crypto industry eyes deep list of government appointments
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photos: Mark Ralston/AFP and Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
While the world is focused on President-elect Trump's top-level appointments, the crypto industry might want to watch some government jobs farther down the ladder.
Why it matters: The people in lower profile positions often end up hammering out the crucial policy details that matter for years, or even decades.
Zoom in: Axios checked in with multiple legal and policy sources to see what positions were on their minds, and some roles came up repeatedly. Not surprisingly, several positions within Treasury were among them:
- Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. This one kept coming up. This person is responsible for the financial monitoring programs as they relate to national security threats, the sort of thing that caught up Tornado Cash.
- Treasury's undersecretary for domestic finance. This person is also likely to feed big-picture data and recommendations to the White House. (Its current staffer was part of writing a newsmaking report on the use of these assets.)
- Treasury's assistant secretary for tax policy. The industry has long hoped for an exemption on small purchases using digital assets.
Another position raised was within the Department of Energy: the Administrator of the Energy Administration Agency. The old chief attempted to do a special review of Bitcoin miners but got smacked down by a federal court.
Zoom out: As an example of a lower profile position with outsized clout, sources pointed us to the deputy attorney general, because that person makes decisions around cases the DOJ takes up.
- We do know Trump's pick for that role: Todd Blanche, an alum of the U.S. attorney's office in the southern district of New York and Trump's legal defense team.
On the bank regulatory side, the picks for FDIC and Office of the Comptroller will be important, though the president-elect is also making noise about consolidating such agencies.
Lastly, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) could be important in a few ways. Crypto is, obviously, tech policy. President Biden's office took it as a given that electricity use by Bitcoin was uniquely bad.
- It might also end up being the office that gives desks to whoever ends up working for Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks.
- The OSTP chief and its deputy for tech are likely to be important in setting policy.
