In brief
- The American Federation of Teachers urged Senate leaders to drop the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, arguing it would weaken investor protections and expose pensions to new risks.
- The union said the bill would erode safeguards for traditional securities and allow tokenized stock to trade without standard registration or reporting.
- The warning landed as negotiations on the crypto market-structure bill grew more contentious, with industry groups split and lawmakers signaling the draft’s prospects have slipped.
The American Federation of Teachers has urged Senate leaders to abandon its crypto market structure bill, warning it would expose working families’ pensions to fraud, unsafe assets, and “profound risks” to retirement security.
In a letter on Monday, AFT President Randi Weingarten wrote the Responsible Financial Innovation Act would strip away the few safeguards currently in place for crypto assets.
He said it would also erode long-standing protections for traditional securities and permit companies to place stock on a blockchain without registering or reporting under existing federal rules. CNBC was first to report the news.
The AFT is the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest labor unions in the U.S. It represents roughly 1.7 million members, including K–12 teachers, school staff, higher-education faculty, nurses, and public-sector workers.
“Rather than providing desperately needed regulation and commonsense guardrails, this bill exposes working families—families with no current involvement in or connection to cryptocurrency—to economic risk and threatens the stability of their retirement security,” Weingarten wrote.
The Responsible Financial Innovation Act is the Senate’s primary proposal on crypto market structure, seeking to define which digital assets fall under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It also seeks to establish a federal framework for how exchanges, brokers, custodians, and token issuers operate, setting uniform standards for registration, disclosures, consumer protection, and the treatment of customer assets.
Discussions are underway on how it could establish new compliance obligations for issuers and intermediaries, potentially creating a legal path for tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments to trade under a revised federal framework.
This week’s debate comes amid a policy environment already fraught with contention, with crypto stakeholders divided over how, and whether, a market structure bill should advance.
At the Blockchain Association’s annual policy summit in Washington, D.C. this week, Decrypt learned how groups that once moved in lockstep are now openly divided over core questions such as DeFi treatment, government visibility into peer-to-peer transactions, and what other compromises could be acceptable to get a bill through Congress.
Several players have withdrawn their support, saying they would rather see no bill at all than one that locks in concessions they consider untenable.
By the second day of the summit, Decrypt reported a widening gap between the optimism voiced on stage and the private assessments shared off it.
Senators from both parties expressed confidence that a new draft could emerge within days.
Yet, key Democratic negotiators, including Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), warned the bill’s prospects had dimmed sharply after indications that the Supreme Court may soon allow President Trump to fire SEC and CFTC commissioners at will.
“It is a deep concern,” Booker told Decrypt at the summit. “This is a massive expansion of presidential power. We’ve seen what [Trump] has done with this power already, to advantage his friends in a very corrupting way.”
With no Democrats currently seated at either federal agency and none expected by at least January, Booker said the absence of minority commissioners could be a deal-breaker and raise doubts about whether a bill relying on those regulators could advance.
Earlier in October, the Supreme Court began considering whether to reverse President Trump’s decision to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a former Democratic FTC commissioner whose husband, Justin Slaughter, is working with crypto investment firm Paradigm to push the bill.
The Court will begin weighing Slaughter’s suit against Trump next week.
Decrypt has reached out to the White House, the SEC, the CFTC, the AFT, and the DOJ for comment.
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