Conservatives warned about debanking. Regulators finally confirmed it

OPINION:

For years, conservatives warned that Americans were being punished financially for their political beliefs, religious convictions and lawful businesses.

We were dismissed as paranoid, branded conspiracy theorists and told that concerns about politically motivated debanking were just another invention of the right.

Now, a federal banking regulator has documented that the very conduct we were told to stop worrying about was the reality we said it was.

Conservatives should be furious, and the people who dismissed these warnings owe the country an explanation.

On Oct. 14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, released findings from its review of nine of the largest national banks it supervises. The agency found that from 2020 to September 2025, all nine maintained policies that could require, encourage or otherwise influence restrictions on banking access because of customers’ political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.

These institutions included J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo.

The finding deserves far more than a passing headline. Some of the most powerful financial institutions in America maintained policies that could turn a customer’s beliefs into a banking liability.

Think about what that means in everyday life.

A political organization needs an account to accept donations and pay employees. A religious nonprofit needs banking services to keep its doors open. A business needs payment processing to sell its products. Cut off those services, and an institution can cripple someone’s ability to operate without ever winning an argument against them.

The consequences reach well beyond an inconvenient trip to another branch. Financial exclusion can threaten livelihoods, silence organizations and make exercising a lawful freedom prohibitively difficult.

The OCC identified broad reputation policies without clear standards or objective financial criteria. It also documented restrictions affecting lawful sectors, including firearms, oil and gas, coal and digital assets.

“Reputation risk” sounds respectable in a corporate presentation. Yet when the standards are vague, whose reputation counts? Is the customer standing in the community, or is the bank standing with activists who want that customer driven out of business?

A lawful enterprise should not have to survive an ideological inspection before opening an account.

Banks must assess creditworthiness, prevent fraud and comply with laws against money laundering. Those responsibilities are essential. They also demand specific evidence and consistent standards. Political disagreement cannot become a substitute for either.

The banks have denied discriminating on political or religious grounds and have pointed to legal requirements and regulatory pressure. Those explanations deserve examination. They do not erase the policies the OCC uncovered.

If Washington pressured banks to shun lawful customers, then Americans deserve to know who applied that pressure. If bank executives created the discriminatory policies, Americans deserve to know who approved them. If both happened, both require accountability.

The review period spans multiple administrations. Establishing responsibility for individual decisions requires examining the records. Congress should demand communications between regulators and banks, the internal instructions governing account restrictions and the reasons customers were denied service.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads. No executive and no government official should be allowed to hide behind an institution’s size or a policy’s deliberately vague language.

President Trump deserves credit for directing the review that produced these findings. His administration also moved to eliminate reputation risk from bank supervision. An April rule issued by the OCC and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. prohibits those agencies from pressuring institutions to close accounts based on political or religious views or solely because a lawful business is politically disfavored.

Those reforms matter. Lasting protection requires enforceable standards that survive the next election.

Congress should establish clear safeguards against political and religious discrimination in banking. Customers should receive meaningful explanations and a practical opportunity to challenge improper account closures, subject to legitimate legal confidentiality requirements.

Where investigations establish violations, regulators should use the remedies permitted by law.

An apology will not restore a damaged business. A revised policy will not reimburse an organization that lost access to its money. Accountability must address both the people harmed and the rules that made the harm possible.

The principle should protect every American. The review report identifies affected organizations on both the right and the left. That strengthens the case for a consistent standard: Lawful customers deserve to be evaluated on legitimate financial and legal grounds, regardless of their politics.

Conservatives can insist on that principle while demanding recognition of the fact that our warnings were justified.

We raised concerns about financial institutions acquiring the power to punish dissent. We were told to trust the system. The system now has serious questions to answer.

Americans should never have to wonder whether supporting a candidate, practicing their faith or operating a lawful business will cost them access to their own money.

We were right to sound the alarm. Now we must insist that those responsible answer for what happened and that the protections put in place are strong enough to prevent it from happening again.

• Tom Carter is the president of the American Conservative Values ETF.