The US government is sitting on roughly 378,372 Bitcoin worth more than $24 billion, according to data from Arkham Research. Yet more than a year after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, no new Bitcoin has been purchased.
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The government has not gone beyond the digital assets it already held from criminal seizures. David Bailey, a former crypto advisor to the Trump administration, says that gap tells the whole story.
Liking Is Not Enough: Bailey
“Liking Bitcoin is not enough,” Bailey said last week at the Bitcoin Investor Week Conference in New York City. He was direct about what he sees as the difference between political goodwill and real action.
His view: Trump’s support for Bitcoin has been real, but support alone does not move markets or policy.
Spending Political Capital Is The Hard Part
Bailey said the administration made an important first step. But first steps, he argued, do not automatically lead to second ones.
Without a willingness to push through resistance — from budget hawks, from skeptical lawmakers, from a political system that does not easily bend to new financial ideas — the reserve order remains mostly symbolic.
Reports say the White House’s own AI and crypto coordinator, David Sacks, acknowledged the challenge early.
Just two months after the executive order was signed, Sacks said adding to the government’s Bitcoin holdings would require a “budget-neutral” approach — meaning no new taxes and no new debt.
That constraint has proven difficult to work around. No framework for how to meet it has been made public.
Bailey did not spare the hard language. “Unless you’re willing to bear the political capital necessary to mobilize the different gears necessary to move the ball forward,” he said, the outcome is the same whether a politician likes Bitcoin or not.
He called out the difference between voicing an opinion and doing the work to back it up.
Bailey Says Bitcoin Wins Either Way
Despite the criticism, Bailey stopped well short of pessimism. He told the conference audience that Bitcoin does not need government action to survive or grow. The question, as he framed it, is only one of timing.
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“Whether it’s four years from now, or 10 years from now, or 20 years from now,” he said, “we will get to the point where we actually have a government that is conducive to the rules we need for Bitcoin to be successful.”
Bailey now runs KindlyMD, a Bitcoin treasury company, and he made clear his focus is on expanding ownership rather than waiting on Washington.
More Bitcoin owners means more voters who have a personal stake in pro-Bitcoin policy — and that, he argued, is what makes adoption inevitable over time.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView
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