(The Epoch Times)—An anti-central bank digital currency (CBDC) sentiment filled the halls of Congress this week as House Republican lawmakers filed new legislation and held a hearing grappling with the issue of digitizing the U.S. dollar.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) reintroduced the Central Bank Digital Currency Anti-Surveillance State Act on Sept. 12, a bill that restricts the Federal Reserve (Fed) and member banks from issuing a digital dollar and using it to construct monetary policy.
Rep. Emmer and the 49 cosponsors fear that the federal government and “unelected bureaucrats” could exploit a CBDC to monitor Americans’ transactions and stifle political activity, effectively eliminating privacy, individual sovereignty, and free-enterprise competition.
“If not designed to be open, permissionless, and private—emulating cash—a government-issued CBDC is nothing more than a CCP-style surveillance tool that would be used to undermine the American way of life,” Mr. Emmer said in a statement, referring to China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party.
He originally introduced the bill in February, warning that the Biden administration would “create a digital authoritarian-style, surveillance-style digital dollar through an executive order.”
The upper chamber has also seen anti-CBDC legislation introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). However, because Democrats control the Senate and the White House, political observers believe it is unlikely that these bills will pass. At the same time, proponents contend that these legislative pursuits will create more awareness about the drawbacks surrounding a CBDC.
‘Government-Sanctioned Surveillance’
The CBDC issue has also made its way to the 2024 election trail, as several candidates have expressed concern over the creation of a digital dollar.
Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and GOP White House hopeful, described himself as a “big opponent” of CBDCs and purported that they are “a grave threat to liberty in this country.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa in July that he would prohibit CBDCs if he were elected in 2024.
“Done, dead, not happening in this country,” Mr. DeSantis said. “If I am the president, on day one, we will nix central bank digital currency.”
Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing behind former President Donald Trump by wide margins in the Republican primary polls, has previously called CBDCs “government-sanctioned surveillance.” In March, he signed a bill that would ban the use of a national CBDC as money within Florida.
“The Biden administration’s efforts to inject a Centralized Bank Digital Currency is about surveillance and control,” he said in a statement. “Today’s announcement will protect Florida consumers and businesses from the reckless adoption of a ‘centralized digital dollar’ which will stifle innovation and promote government-sanctioned surveillance. Florida will not side with economic central planners; we will not adopt policies that threaten personal economic freedom and security.”
In a June interview with the New York Post, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argued that CBDCs are “instruments of control and oppression, and are certain to be abused.”
Speaking at a fintech conference hosted by the Philadelphia Fed Bank on Sept. 8, Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr noted that the central bank “has made no decision on issuing a CBDC.”
“Investigation and research are very different from decision-making about next steps in terms of payments system development, and we are a long way from that,” Mr. Barr said in a speech. “The Federal Reserve has made no decision on issuing a CBDC and would only proceed with the issuance of a CBDC with clear support from the executive branch and authorizing legislation from Congress.”
Digital Dollar Dilemma
Five witnesses appeared before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion on Sept. 14. The hearing consisted of a chorus of anti-CBDC voices, with Chairman French Hill (R-Ark.) asserting that CBDCs do not have much support “except from those on the fringes who think somehow a CBDC might be an amazing solution to many unstated global problems.”
A CBDC could extend the government with more tools to infringe on individual liberty, said Christina Parajon Skinner, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Introducing CBDC is likely to have certain costs to individual economic liberty by providing the state with more tools—and hence greater temptation—to establish command-and-control style public policy,” Ms. Skinner told lawmakers, adding that it could diminish private innovation, impact financial market structures, and fail to advance specific goals, like preserving the global dollar hegemony.
“Technology and economic geopolitics can change rapidly, to be sure, but at least right now, the costs of introducing CBDC appear to outweigh the benefits,” she said.
Norbert Michel, the vice president and director at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, cited a litany of risks, including threats to core freedoms.
If a CBDC were installed during the coronavirus pandemic, the government could have programmed a CBDC only to allow transactions with businesses deemed essential or alert authorities if citizens violated COVID lockdowns, Mr. Michel noted.
“The possibilities for the programmability of a CBDC are nearly endless,” he stated. “And in all of them, even the best of intentions are just a few steps away from leading to serious abuses of power.”
This concern might emanate from a recent discussion at the World Economic Forum during a so-called Summer Davos event in China. Cornell University professor Eswar Prasad discussed the possibility of using CBDCs to socially engineer society.
“You could have … a potentially better—or some people might say a darker world—where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like, say, ammunition, or drugs, or pornography, or something of the sort,” Mr. Prasad told the audience in June. “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”
According to the Atlantic Council, 11 countries have launched a digital currency, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Anguilla. Twenty-one nations have launched pilot projects, and 33 are still in the development phase. Dozens of others are researching the subject.
Results from the Cato Institute 2023 CBDC National Survey found that only 16 percent of Americans support the federal government issuing a central bank digital currency, as many are skeptical. Despite the lack of support, even inside countries that have adopted and employed some incarnation of a digital currency, a 2022 Bank of International Settlements (BIS) study found that 60 percent of central banks have bolstered their CBDC work.
What do you think? Sound off on our Economic Collapse Substack.
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.
