Trump still wants to buy Bitcoin for the US reserve, but open-market purchases face a law,

What Witt said

President Donald Trump is still interested in buying Bitcoin for the US strategic Bitcoin reserve, but direct purchases on the open market run into a legal obstacle. That is the account of Patrick Witt, who left his post as executive director of the White House crypto council in October to move to the private sector, in an interview on the podcast What Bitcoin Did.

“I can tell you the president is interested,” Witt said, according to Bitcoin.com News. “There were a lot of conversations about how we could do that.”

Witt said it is “legally questionable whether there can even be direct open-market purchases,” because Congress controls federal spending. Lawmakers have already moved to close that route, he said: concerns about purchases led Congress to “actually put a clause in the NDAA that says you can't do that,” referring to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual US defense budget law. “We're trying to get to the point where it's allowed and the authority is granted,” he added.

How the reserve was set up

Trump created the reserve by executive order on 6 March 2025. It consists of Bitcoin the Treasury has finally seized in criminal or civil proceedings, according to the White House order. The Treasury and Commerce departments were also told to develop strategies for acquiring more Bitcoin that are “budget-neutral” and cost taxpayers nothing extra.

No such strategy has been published, and the government has not announced an open-market purchase.

Witt described making the reserve permanent as a steeper climb. Passing a standalone law would be “incredibly difficult” with a divided Congress, he said, and he found it hard to imagine Democrats approving such a measure. Without a law, the reserve rests on executive orders that a future president can undo; reversing a predecessor's orders is “one of the first things they do,” Witt said.

A German comparison

Germany took a different route with Bitcoin it had seized. The Dresden public prosecutor's office sold about 49,858 Bitcoin between 19 June and 12 July 2024 from the criminal case around the movie2k platform, raising €2,639,683,413.92, according to its press release. The sale was an emergency disposal under section 111p of the German criminal procedure code, because significant losses in value were feared given price swings.

After the midterms

The interview took place days after the midterm elections of 3 November, in which the Democrats won both chambers of Congress. Galaxy Research has since warned of new risks for the sector. The analysis firm expects, among other things, that Democrat-led committees will scrutinise crypto business tied to Trump. Elizabeth Warren, one of the sharpest critics of cryptocurrencies, is expected to chair the Senate banking committee, as Bitcoin.com News reported. The CLARITY Act has also stalled in the Senate, and the White House has reviewed the SEC's crypto rules since the election.

Not everyone has given up on the reserves. Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, linked the successes of both parties to Bitcoin reserves after the election and argued that support for state Bitcoin holdings crosses party lines.

Bitcoin traded at about $73,600 on 11 November, after falling to $72,787 following unexpectedly high US consumer prices. Interest-rate markets then priced in a possible Federal Reserve rate increase in December.

Still to watch: possible Treasury guidance on budget-neutral acquisition methods, the fate of the NDAA clause in the next defense bill, and whether the outgoing Congress passes any digital-asset legislation before the Democrats take over in January.