Republican Sen. Ted Cruz introduced new legislation on March 21 that would ban the Federal Reserve from launching a “direct-to-consumer” central bank digital currency (CBDC), citing concerns over its potential to be used as a “financial surveillance tool” by the federal government.
The latest bill is a second attempt by Cruz to stop the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC directly to individuals after he introduced a similar bill in March 2022.
Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are co-sponsors.
In a press release announcing the bill, Cruz noted that countries such as China are developing CBDCs that “omit the benefits and protections of cash, as well as the control and security of many existing digital cryptocurrencies,” adding that it is “more important than ever to ensure the United States’ digital currency policy protects financial privacy, maintains the dollar’s dominance, and cultivates innovation.”
The senator argued that CBDCs that fail to adhere to those principles risk allowing the central bank to “mobilize itself into a retail bank, collect personally identifiable information on users, and track their transactions indefinitely.”
He went on to note that CBDCs are issued and backed by a government entity and transactions are conducted through a centralized blockchain controlled by a single individual or entity, unlike decentralized digital currencies like bitcoin, which is one of the main advantages of using such cryptocurrencies.
Surveillance Fears
“Not only would this CBDC model centralize Americans’ financial information, leaving it vulnerable to attack, it could be used as direct surveillance tool into the private transactions of Americans,” he said.
Cruz also said the federal government has no authority to unilaterally establish a CBDC.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 encouraging the Federal Reserve to explore and develop a CBDC for use in the United States. The order instructs the central bank to research, develop, and assess whether such a currency can be implemented in a way that “protects Americans’ interests” should it be deemed “in the national interest.”
In November, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York completed its first phase of a multiphase research effort dubbed “Project Cedar,” which examined how cross-border wholesale payments could be improved through the development of a blockchain-enabled wholesale CBDC prototype.
According to Fed officials, phase 1 proved to be a success and showed that blockchain-enabled cross-border payments can be “faster, simultaneous, and safer.”
Powell Says Fed Just ‘Experimenting’
In November, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and several large financial companies—including Citigroup Inc., HSBC, and Wells Fargo & Company—participated in a digital dollar pilot project with Mastercard and SWIFT.
That 12-week program tested a version of an interoperable digital money platform known as the regulated liability network (RLN) that operated exclusively in U.S. dollars and allowed commercial banks to issue “simulated digital money or ‘tokens’—representing the deposits of their own customers—and settle through simulated central bank reserves on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger.”
In a separate pilot project, the New York Fed’s innovation center worked with the Monetary Authority of Singapore to see how wholesale central bank digital currencies could “improve the efficiency of cross-border wholesale payments involving multiple currencies.”
Amid concerns over the Fed’s work on CBDCs, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a House Financial Services Committee hearing earlier in March that no decision has been made regarding whether a CBDC is warranted in the United States.
“We’re not at the stage of making any real decisions,” said Powell. “What we’re doing is experimenting in kind of early stage experimentation. How would this work? Does it work? What’s the best technology? What’s the most efficient?”
Cruz is not the only Republican official to raise concerns over the central bank’s work regarding CBDCs.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called on state lawmakers to introduce legislation banning the digital dollar in Florida and urged other states to do the same.
Elsewhere, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) has also introduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act to prohibit the Fed from issuing a CBDC for use in monetary policy (pdf).
Our premium content partners at The Epoch Times has contacted the Federal Reserve for comment.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
