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As the U.S. Senate began its process to consider a resolution to erase the recent IRS rule that targets DeFi, the White House cheered it on.
Mar 4, 2025, 5:04 p.m. UTC
The White House is signaling a likely approval from President Donald Trump if a congressional resolution hits his desk that would rescind a crypto Internal Revenue Service rule approved just before he returned to office.
Trump's senior advisers will recommend he sign the Congressional Review Act resolution into law, according to a Tuesday statement posted by David Sacks, the president's crypto czar, saying that the "midnight regulation in the final days of the previous administration" is an unnecessary burden on decentralized finance (DeFi) in the U.S.
The rule "inappropriately requires certain DeFi participants to report gross proceeds from cryptocurrency sales and other digital asset transactions, including data about the taxpayers involved," according to the statement, which emerged as the U.S. Senate began considering the resolution that could delete the IRS' work under the authority of the CRA.
In the opening moments of what could be a longer floor debate on Tuesday, a number of Democrats voted yes on a motion to proceed with Republican Senator Ted Cruz's resolution, showing some split in the party over opening the discussion on it. The initial motion to proceed with Senate action drew what's known as a super majority of senators, 70-28, meaning more than two thirds of the chamber voted yes to move ahead.
"In a bipartisan, super majority vote, the Senate voted to move forward to discuss and debate the CRA resolution," noted Jenn Rosenthal, a spokesperson for the DeFi Education Fund. "This is a tremendous step forward, and now we move to the debate before the full Senate vote."
In order for the CRA resolution to reach Trump, it has to pass both the Senate and the House of Representatives, where the matter had previously advanced through a committee vote.
Read More: U.S. Senate Expected to Vote on Erasing IRS's Crypto Broker Rule That Threatens DeFi: Source
The CRA allows Congress to get rid of the rules of federal regulators approved in a very recent time window, making a tight deadline for the lawmakers to oppose the work of the previous administration.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, an industry supporter who heads a digital assets subcommittee, argued in a post on social-media site X that "these heavy-handed federal rules threaten to drive American crypto entrepreneurs overseas at a time when we should be cultivating this industry at home."
The vote continues what promises to be a big week for crypto in Washington, with Trump's weekend expressions of support for a crypto reserve, to an end-of-week meeting with crypto leaders and regulators at the White House. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is also planning a crypto CEO forum.
Jesse Hamilton
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
