At 10:00am Eastern this morning the House Financial Services Committee takes up H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026, in Room 2128 of the Rayburn building. It is one of nine bills on the committee's docket. Most coverage describes it as the bill that creates a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve with a 20-year lockup. The reserve already exists, and has since March 2025. The no-sale policy, in substance, already exists too.
What the bill adds - and this is the part almost nobody is covering - is a way to pay for making the reserve bigger. ARMA does not merely make an existing policy harder to unwind. It supplies a funding route, by revaluing an accounting entry on the Federal Reserve's books that has been frozen since 1973.
What is already in force
Executive Order 14233, signed 6 March 2025 and published in the Federal Register on 11 March, established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve alongside a separate United States Digital Asset Stockpile for non-bitcoin assets. It was capitalised with bitcoin the Treasury already held through criminal and civil asset forfeiture and civil money penalties, not through purchases. The order states that bitcoin in the reserve shall not be sold. It directed the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring more, which is an instruction to go and find a way, not an authorisation to spend.
So the headline features of the bill as reported - a reserve, a no-sale rule, a stockpile for other digital assets - describe something that has been the executive branch's stated position for eighteen months.
Statute versus signature
One genuine change is the instrument. An executive order is revocable by the next president with a signature and no process at all. A statute requires Congress to unwind it. A 20-year lockup written into law is therefore not really a statement about bitcoin's investment horizon. It is a statement about the next four presidential terms, and about which branch gets to change its mind.
That argument is real, but it does not go far on its own, because a prohibition on selling an asset nobody is selling changes very little in practice. The operative question is not what the government is forbidden to sell. It is what it is newly equipped to buy.
The gold entry that has not moved since 1973
The Gold Reserve Act, as amended in 1973, requires the Treasury to carry its gold at 42.22 dollars per troy ounce. The Treasury holds roughly 261.5 million ounces. At the statutory price that is a book value a little over 11 billion dollars. At any market price of the past two decades it is worth vastly more. One widely cited estimate put the market value near 640 billion dollars; Senator Cynthia Lummis's Senate bill has worked from a revaluation gain of 747.3 billion dollars. Both figures move with the gold price and neither should be read as current. The point is the ratio rather than the level: the book value is understated by a factor of several dozen.
The mechanism both chambers reach for is the same. The Federal Reserve banks hold gold certificates issued against that Treasury gold, denominated at the 1973 statutory price. Under the Senate's BITCOIN Act, the Reserve banks tender those certificates back to the Treasury Secretary, who within 90 days issues new certificates reflecting the fair market value of the gold, and the difference is credited to the Treasury. ARMA, by its own title, establishes the reserve while offsetting costs using certain resources of the Federal Reserve System. That is the same operation described in the passive voice.
Reporting on the bill text describes an acquisition target of roughly one million bitcoin over five years, which is about five per cent of the total supply and mirrors the Senate bill's 200,000-a-year schedule. That is the provision the funding mechanism exists to serve, and it is categorically absent from EO 14233, which authorises no purchases whatsoever.
Why budget-neutral is a claim rather than a description
Revaluing the gold certificates does not produce gold, sell gold, or raise revenue. It changes the number at which an asset the government already owns is carried, and credits the Treasury with the difference. Supporters are right that this is not new borrowing and does not add to the debt in the ordinary sense. The 42.22 dollar figure is a leftover from a currency regime that ended in 1971, and correcting a stale book entry is a defensible thing to want to do. That is the serious version of the argument and it deserves to be met on its terms.
The counter-argument is equally concrete. The Federal Reserve tenders certificates and receives certificates of far greater face value; the credit created lands in the Treasury General Account as spendable balances, and is then spent on an asset. Critics of the Lummis version have characterised that as monetisation with a bookkeeping step in front of it. Which reading you accept is a question about central bank accounting rather than about bitcoin. But the phrase no cost to American taxpayers is load-bearing in both bills, and it should be read as the contested claim it is rather than as a description of the transaction.
The size nobody has had to tell you
ARMA, as reported, would require quarterly proof-of-reserve reports produced by third-party auditors. This is the provision with the least coverage and arguably the most consequence, because there is no consolidated official figure for how much bitcoin the United States government holds.
What exists instead is third-party estimation, built from on-chain analysis of addresses believed to be government-controlled, and those estimates disagree badly. Figures in circulation this year run from roughly 198,000 BTC to about 328,000 BTC. That spread is wider than the entire declared holding of any other sovereign. It is not a rounding difference. It is a gap of more than 100,000 coins in what informed observers think the United States owns.
Set that against the other two provisions and the shape of the thing becomes visible. The bill would impose a 20-year commitment and contemplate multiplying the holding several times over, against a base quantity Congress has never been formally told. Of the three headline provisions, the audit requirement is the only one that would change that. It is the sleeper clause.
What a markup is, and what it is not
A markup is a committee proceeding in which members amend a bill and vote on whether to report it. Reporting it favourably sends it to the full House. It is not passage by the House, it is not enactment, and today it is one of nine items on the agenda. The bill was introduced by Representative Nick Begich of Alaska on 21 May 2026, with Representative Jared Golden of Maine as Democratic co-lead and more than twenty co-sponsors - a healthier bipartisan posture than most crypto legislation manages, and still no guarantee of floor time in either chamber.
The obvious precedent is Senator Lummis's BITCOIN Act, which has been live in the Senate since 2025 on essentially the same architecture and has not moved. The most likely near-term outcome of this morning is a reported bill and a press cycle.
The honest summary
The United States has held bitcoin for years and has had a stated policy of not selling it since March 2025. Today's bill would make that policy statutory, which matters mainly from 2029 onwards. The provisions that would actually change behaviour are the two getting the least attention: a funding route that converts a fifty-three-year-old accounting convention into purchasing power, and an audit requirement that would, for the first time, put a number in public that no part of the government has ever been obliged to publish.
