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Weekly Washington Policy Pulse: Will The Senate Pass A Crypto Bill? (August 3, 2026)
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this is your weekly Washington Policy Pulse on the Balance of Power podcast. I'm Joe Matthew. Every Monday, Bloomberg Intelligence, senior policy analyst and friend of the show, Nathan Dean shares his weekly call on upcoming catalysts in the nation's capital. Listen for the most recent and relevant policy research from our team at Bloomberg Intelligence. Now with today's installment, here's Nathan Dean.
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Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the Washington Policy Pulse. My name is Nathan Dean. I'm a senior policy analyst here in Washington D.C. with Bloomberg Intelligence. Wanna say thank you very much for joining and thank you to those of you who are listening to via the Balance of Power podcast. We always appreciate listening. Today is August 3rd. It's 10:01am Eastern. The Senate is still here. The House is out. It's gonna be fairly quick just cause I don't think there's gonna be a ton of stuff happen. But it is the race for the August recess. Now the first thing I want to start out with was an update on the Clarity Act. This is the Crypto market structure bill that if you've been listening to these calls, you know that I've been in at a 60% chance of passage. And as of right now I just still want to see what's going on. And my joke is is that if you ever come into the office and I get a question wrong, I owe you a Bloomberg coffee. And for those of you who are watching this on the live stream, these are free. So if I do get this wrong, you're welcome to come into the Bloomberg Bureau. Full disclosure, if you come to Washington, you say, hey, let's get coffee. I'll take you to Tate across the street and I'll get you a better coffee than that. But what happens here is that we are most likely going to see a procedural vote later this week. Now, the Democrats still aren't on board with the Republican and White House offer on ethics provisions. There are still hiccups related to the stable bitcoin rewards provisions of the crypto bill. Now, for what it's worth, I don't think that's going to change. And when, I mean hiccups, I mean, people are still saying that they're not entirely on board with it. But I think what's going to happen is, is that you are going to see a procedural vote later this week. Now, this procedural vote is a vote that gets you to keep the ball rolling here. And this is going to have essentially two impacts. One is that if the procedural vote occurs and it passes, it allows negotiations to continue. It allows them to negotiate over the rest of the August rece and it buys them more time that they could come back in September. The other thing that this vote does is it essentially puts everybody on the record. And so if it fails and a lot of moderate Democrats who have been flirting with the idea of supporting a crypto bill ultimately come out against it, then the crypto political action money can actually been released over August recess and will either support or harm or combat those opponents or proponents of the bill, depending on how they vote. Now, long story short is, or maybe the short story long is that I think I'm beginning to think I owe a lot of people Bloomberg coffees. I'm not changing my number right now. It's still 60%. I'm going to give it another day or two. But look, it's looking more and more unlikely. But if you've been listening to these calls, you know that my theory has always been is that the banks ultimately want a deal because if they don't get it, then the crypto platforms can essentially do whatever they want under a regulatory friendly environment for the next two years from a crypto platform. I definitely want a deal now because if not, it looks like you may have try under a Democratic House of Representatives next, next year. That's going to be difficult. And if you don't get a deal in two years, a Democratic president could come in and really change the regulatory landscape. And if I'm a politician, I want to deal well, because of the crypto platform money, not the crypto platform money, I'm sorry, the crypto political action money. So ultimately we'll see where it goes. Now if the bill does, if we get a scenario where like later this week maybe the Democrats come out and say, fine, I'll give you seven votes just to keep the ball rolling, then this debate essentially gets transformed to September. September is looking a little bit less tight because of some of the work that's going on related to the government shutdown. As a Reminder, before the House left, they passed a stopgap measure that would keep the government open from September 30 to December 4. The Senate is currently going to be voting tonight on a stopgap measure that keeps the government open through December 11th. These are two separate measures. The Democratic, I'm sorry, the Democratic. The House one can actually be more of the clean one. The Senate one does have a little bit more provisions in here that both the White House and Democrats may not like. So even if this passes, and let's just presume it passes, if it passes and it keeps it open to December 11, then the house has to come back in September and they have to accept or reject the Senate deal. And this is really the dynamic here of how the shutdown argument in September is going to be playing out is based off of the vote tonight. If the vote passes. And full disclosure, just remember, I'm at a 30% chance of a shutdown. Actually, I think it's a 40% chance. When I updated before, sorry, I'm still on vacation mode, I was at a 40% chance of a shutdown. And I actually was told by a couple of folks who work on Capitol Hill they thought that was too high. But as of right now, I don't think a shutdown is going to happen. But if this Senate does pass the stopgap measure tonight, the shutdown debate in September becomes a fight between the Senate and the House and the White House over conflicting provisions. If it doesn't pass and the House measure is the one that people start discussing, then it becomes a fight between Republicans and Democrats over the provisions. And so those two different scenarios have different outcomes here. Because then you get into a scenario where if it's scenario one and it's the Senate versus the House, then you need bipartisan solutions on both sides. And it just gets messy or, you know, maybe the House rejects it. It just gets messy again. Long story short is I do think we are going to have a stopgap solution in September, but fireworks are going to take place. The last thing I want to talk about is give you an update on reconciliation. So as a reminder, the House unlocked its instructions for its bill. This is the majority of defense spending, plus the farm aid. The Senate is going to try and unlock their provision or their instructions this week that would actually allow them to come back in September and move things a lot quicker. I still think it's going to be a challenge. You know, this bill, for example, example, the $67 billion that's out there for the Department of Defense is nowhere near what the White House requested, $350 billion. There are some folks in the Senate who are like, look, I want to go there. I want to go 350 billion. Let's increase the number of defense spending. But you also run into the problem, the deficit hawks, because there's no offset measures in here. And so if you were to increase this number and say let's go to 350 billion plus the 11 billion in farm aid and there's no offsetting measures here, now the deficit hawks have a problem and can they get this all done before the November midterms? I'm not exactly sure. You'd have to scale this thing down and make it fairly clean beyond what it is right now. So again, we'll see. And then we have started getting questions about lame duck. What I will say is that if the Democrats win the House of Representatives, the only lame duck measures out there would be another attempt at a reconciliation bill. Like what can the Republicans try and pass before the Democrats take over the House of Representatives. If the Democrats don't take over the House of Representatives or the Senate, then you're not going to see a ton in the way of lame duck bills just because the Republicans are going to say we can do this again next year. So again, I don't think this is going to be very much of an active lame duck period. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are, more often they're not. But we'll go ahead and get see from there. So I said I promised it would be a quick call. We're at about eight minutes right now. So that's where we're going to leave it. We are going to try and have this call next week. I will cancel it if nothing is going on. I don't want to waste any more time. So watch for that email that comes from your subscription that comes out about an hour in advance. What we'll do is, is that if nothing's happening, you know, you'll get an email probably about an hour advance saying, hey, this call has been canceled. My intention is still have it. And to be honest, bring some questions if you want to chat or if I can find somebody around here who's not on vacation who's got some really cool piece of research. For example, the FCC on Thursday is going to vote to unlock their broadcast caps. Matt Shetton Helm is going to be looking at that meeting. It' to be looking at the litigation risk afterwards. The DOJ antitrust chief, the nominee has his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. That's going to be somewhat of interesting that we're going to be looking at. And then finally we saw the new farm bill text that came out over the weekend that has nationwide E15 sales in there. So Brett Gibbs is currently looking at that. He's, you know, for what it's worth on the farm bill is that right now let me back up here. So the farm bill has to be done by September 30 and the farm bill historically and if you need to drop, feel free to drop because I'm just going to take our 8 minute call and go to about 12 minutes now. So I apologize for that. But the way that the farm bill is actually structured right now is historically farm bill. The biggest impact the markets from the farm bill was SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps. That has been taken out of the farm bill by the one big beautiful bill. And as a result the farm bill is now what's called the skinny farm bill. Crop reference prices, other things that are important to the agricultural world. The text that just came out last week and a full disclosure, I have not read it yet because today's my first day back in the office. It included nationwide annual E15 sale or gasoline. Brett Gibbs, our analyst, has been looking at this quite a bit. If you have any questions on this, just please feel free to reach out to Brett. But the thing here with the is that if you've been reading my notes in the terminal, the farm bill I've always said is going to have a small extension is most likely scenario. I still think that's going to be the case. But we are beginning to see chatter because the biggest hiccup from the farm bill perspective from the Democratic side was the fact that they're trying to block the transfer of SNAP benefit payments from the federal government to state governments, essentially trying to reverse what the wouldn't be beautiful bill did. The problem for the Republican side is is that this is all supposed to take place fairly soon and you are beginning to see a little bit of Senate Republicans come out and say, well maybe we shouldn't transfer the payments of snaps to the states just yet. So I don't have a good feeling on where those negotiations are. I'm sure somebody listening to this call has a better idea than I do because I haven't talked with some friends over closer to this debate yet. But that's what I'm going to be working on this week to try and get a better idea of where those farm bill negotiations are. So if questions in the midterm, in the interim, please feel free to reach out to Brett. So I'm going to stop there. I'm going to say thank you very much. Actually just one other thing popped into my mind so I apologize for not being very well prepared this morning is keep an eye on tariffs. You know, things like copper tariffs, things like other type of tariff announcements. President Trump has an executive order today at 1:30. I'm not exactly sure what that executive order is, but then President Trump is going to move out to Nevada and California for tomorrow and Wednesday to get a little bit out of Washington, Washington and try and tout some of his economic benefits. I just would keep an eye on any potential tariff announcements that that's usually when something like that occurs. So I promise I'm going to stop now. Thank you very much for listening. We really appreciate it and we will talk soon. Take care.
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Our thanks to Nathan Dean, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Policy Analyst, bringing you the latest installment of his weekly Washington Policy Pulse. For more from BI or to join this call live each week you can email Nathan@ndeanloomburg.net that's N-E A-nloomburg.net and come back to the podcast later today for the latest edition of Balance of Power.
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