Why Trump backed a crypto ethics rule that stopped at the family business

Washington came surprisingly close this week to writing a dollar amount into one of its thorniest crypto ethics rule debates.

Under the final Senate draft of the CLARITY Act, senior federal officials holding equity worth at least $15,000 in certain businesses that issue or sponsor digital assets would have had to sell that interest or place it into a qualified blind trust. Their spouses would have faced the same restriction, but their adult children wouldn't.

The bill failed to advance on Sept. 15, so none of this became law. But the language is revealing because CLARITY was primarily supposed to establish who regulates crypto markets and under what rules. By the end of the negotiations, Congress was also trying to decide where a government official's crypto fortune ends and the family's begins. Republicans said the final draft incorporated most of a bipartisan ethics proposal and dozens of changes requested by Democrats, while several Democrats still argued that the protections didn't go far enough.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick shows why those distinctions matter in real life.

Lutnick spent decades running Cantor Fitzgerald, one of Wall Street's major trading and investment firms, before joining President Donald Trump's Cabinet in February 2025. Cantor also became deeply embedded in crypto through its relationship with Tether, the company behind USDT, the world's largest stablecoin. The firm has held billions of dollars of Treasuries for Tether and remains involved in its US business, including as reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer for Tether's regulated US stablecoin.