The Trump administration has granted preliminary approval for a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump’s family to operate a federally chartered trust bank, over the protests of Democrats who decried the decision as riddled with conflicts of interest.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank regulatory arm of the Treasury Department, said in a letter on Friday that it was conditionally approving World Liberty Trust Co.’s application for a trust bank charter. The company must still meet additional requirements before it receives final approval, the regulator said.

The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest. It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.

World Liberty Trust Co. President and Chairman Zach Witkoff said the charter will allow the company to manage its USD1 stablecoin, a crypto token whose value is pegged to $1, under the OCC’s watch.

“USD1 grew because institutions trust how it operates, and confidence at enterprise scale deserves the backing of federal supervision,” Witkoff, the son of Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said in a statement. “We welcome continuous scrutiny from Federal regulators for many years to come.”

While Washington has been in knots over the steady drumbeat of news that Trump-linked businesses are expanding during his second term, the World Liberty application stood out to many.

Some Democrats and ethics watchdogs argued that the bid was one of the clearest examples of the conflicts of interest that administration officials face as they weigh the wishes of Trump family-backed companies. And they were quick to bash the OCC’s approval.

“This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Warren and other Democrats unveiled legislation on Friday that would prohibit regulators from approving banks that are owned or controlled by the president or the president’s family, vice president, members of Congress or other top government officials.

A Democratic Senate aide said the Banking Committee would likely probe the OCC’s approval of the World Liberty bank charter next year if Democrats regain control of Congress.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington CEO Donald Sherman called the OCC’s approval “the most egregious example to date of the President’s businesses profiting from his government job.”

“The President continues to boost the crypto market at the expense of everyday Americans who are wondering what happened to the money in their own bank accounts,” he said.

World Liberty, in advance of the approval, had rejected the conflict allegations — saying Trump is not involved in managing the company and that none of its leaders or employees work for the federal government. The White House has similarly said Trump has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his official responsibilities.

Trump and his family nevertheless retain a substantial financial stake in World Liberty Financial. DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with Trump and members of his family, owns about 38 percent of the holding company that controls World Liberty Financial, according to the company’s website. The entity and Trump family members also hold 22.5 billion of World Liberty’s governance tokens.

Trump disclosed nearly $600 million in income from World Liberty token and equity sales in 2025, a major piece of the $1.4 billion of crypto-related earnings he raked in. He has said he does not manage his financial interests, which are overseen by his children.

The approval doesn’t allow World Liberty to open a traditional bank, but rather a national trust bank — a limited-purpose institution that would not make loans or accept federally insured deposits. It’s the latest in a string of such approvals for crypto firms under Trump’s OCC. Others who have received similar green lights include Circle, Ripple and Coinbase.

The charter still provides significant legal and financial advantages. It’ll allow World Liberty to issue and redeem its USD1 stablecoin directly, manage the reserves backing it and offer digital asset custody services without relying on an intermediary. The company could also operate across state lines more easily without having to answer to individual state regulators.

Federal supervision could also bolster World Liberty’s credibility with customers and investors and help expand the use of USD1.

“This is not World Liberty trying to become Chase or Bank of America. This is World Liberty trying to become like Circle,” the crypto giant, said Austin Campbell, a crypto adviser and professor at New York University. The newly acquired charter, Campbell added, “is a regulatory wrapper to be able to hold these things in the way required under U.S. law to do business with both retail and the big boys.”

The decision to approve World Liberty Trust Co. had put Comptroller Jonathan Gould, a Trump appointee, in the extraordinary position of deciding whether to grant federal banking privileges to a business tied to the president’s family.

Gould had rejected calls to pause the review or recuse himself. And he declined a request by Democrats to share the full, unredacted application submitted by World Liberty. “We process applications in a fair and evenhanded manner,” he told lawmakers in February.

Stephen Lybarger, the top OCC official overseeing bank chartering and a longtime career official of the agency, wrote in the approval letter on Friday that the agency followed “established policies and procedures” in evaluating World Liberty’s application.

“The Comptroller and staff acted consistently with their statutory duties and ethical obligations with respect to the Application,” Lybarger wrote. “Career OCC staff reviewed the application for consistency with the statutory, regulatory, and policy requirements and factors for approval of a de novo application.”

The OCC declined to comment further. The agency consulted with career government ethics officials as it evaluated the World Liberty application, according to a person familiar with the process.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week publicly rejected President Donald Trump’s latest Gaza peace plan.

The Trump administration can live with it — for now.

The administration says it’s less concerned with what Netanyahu says than what the Israeli Defense Forces do. A U.S. official, who, like others in the story, was granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said that the administration was initially “disappointed” that Israel responded to the 15-point peace proposal by ramping up attacks in Gaza — but is pleased that it has since eased its assault.

Now, the administration is willing to give the Israeli prime minister some leeway to message the peace plan in the way he needs to, the official said. There is broad understanding that he is two months from a tough reelection — and needs to please his own hard-right allies to win. Few expected the president’s roadmap to be wholesale embraced, even as Trump on Truth Social trumpeted it as a “major milestone” in the conflict.

“We recognize the complexities that come from the Israeli elections, and we’re obviously going to give Bibi a space to try and navigate that,” the official said. But in turn, “they need to give us a little bit of space in terms of no targeted killings in order to allow us to try to get to the next phase, so there’s a lot more challenges to go to get there.”

U.S. officials and Hamas negotiated the latest peace framework separately, with help from Middle East allies. The proposal, announced last month, called for Hamas to disarm and relinquish governance in Gaza and Israel to withdraw its military from the territory. The plan stalled when Hamas said it would not disarm until Israel withdrew, and Israel said it would not withdraw until Hamas disarmed.

Even as skeptics of the Trump plan criticized the president for overhyping its achievement, U.S. officials believed that they needed to go public once Hamas was on board to lock in its pledge to disarm. Despite the president’s public confidence, administration officials privately expected that the proposal would likely face pushback from Netanyahu but that talks could continue with Israel.

Still, they considered the roadmap a significant win.

“Nobody’s ever gotten to this point where they got Hamas to agree to this, so that’s a necessary step before actually disarming it,” the U.S. official said.

And there are signs that Israel is preparing for the possibility of withdrawal anyway, with Israeli media reporting Israel’s defense establishment began weighing contingencies to do so in the days after Netanyahu’s public rejection.

Another administration official said the Board of Peace, a 27-country initiative formed as part of Trump’s deal last year to end the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been “getting good cooperation on the ground of late.”

“That’s what’s important,” the administration official said.

And it’s not just Trump administration officials hailing the framework as a step in the right direction. Former ambassadors and administration officials, including some who served in the Biden and Obama administrations, see the recent commitment the U.S. secured from Hamas to disarm — a monthslong sticking point in the peace process — as a small, but meaningful step, even as doubts remain whether Hamas will follow through. A member of the Hamas political bureau, according to the Associated Press, said this week that Hamas remains “committed to the roadmap.”

“For Netanyahu, his primary objective, of course, is getting through his election so he’s going to at least voice rejection even while he may allow some aspects of it to move forward,” said Dan Shapiro, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration. “It looks like Trump is tolerating the Netanyahu two-step. These two have done a dance like this before and as long as certain elements of it are moving forward … Trump seems to be willing to tolerate Netanyahu’s stated rejection.”

Even Trump appeared in little hurry Monday to escalate the dispute with Netanyahu, insisting to reporters in the Oval Office that he had a “good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister despite the very public rejection of his peace proposal.

The White House referred requests for comment to the Board of Peace.

A Board of Peace official added that “separate discussions with Israel are continuing.”

“The objective remains the full decommissioning of weapons and ensuring Gaza can never again pose the kind of threat Israel faced on October 7,” the official said. “Plans are moving forward in this regard. We have seen important elements of cooperation in recent days and we are intensifying our efforts to accelerate progress.”

The U.S. official added that Israel remains skeptical that Hamas will follow through on their commitments, while noting the country was similarly skeptical that Hamas would release the Israeli hostages.

“We basically have built a lot of credit with them. And I think that they’re willing to give us more of a shot to see if we can get to the next phase,” the official said. “We’re in an uncomfortable position for everyone, but I think that there’s a pathway to get through it.”

The idea that Israeli troops are at least planning to withdraw — especially if that withdrawal goes to the yellow line in Gaza, a key point of the plan the Board of Peace proposed — is giving Trump allies hope that Netanyahu’s words are meant for a domestic audience, while his actions are meant to demonstrate he might consider a deal in the future.

“Netanyahu’s playing a fairly tricky tightrope, where on the one hand he flexes his muscle for domestic audiences, given his situation at election eve, and on the other hand, he’s doing some baby steps in the direction of the 15-point plan — testing the tolerance of the American or Board of Peace team,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as senior diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, said that “of course it’s a win” to get Hamas to agree to disarm. And, behind the scenes, he said there continues to be movement between the U.S and Israel.

“Slowly we and Israel are moving forward on both Lebanon and Gaza even in the face of Israeli elections,” Jeffrey said.

Still, the incremental movement leaves fundamental questions, which have repeatedly stymied efforts to create a lasting peace between Israel and Gaza. U.S. allies are also concerned that Netanyahu’s public rejection of the latest peace plan is undermining confidence in the Board of Peace and the broader Middle East peace efforts.

Hamas’ willingness to disarm is conditioned on Israel withdrawing from Gaza, leaving unresolved how — and in what order — either side would carry out its commitments.

Hamas is supposed to turn over its weapons to a United Nations-created body responsible for governing the day-to-day operation in Gaza, and that governing authority is supposed to eventually run the territory, supervised by the Board of Peace, though the timeline for leadership handover remains uncertain. And Israel, meanwhile, has not agreed to the withdrawal in the plan, even as its military is preparing for the possibility.

But administration allies don’t really expect some big peace ceremony at Camp David or in Geneva. They’ll settle for dialogue, however tenuous.

“You have to judge these things incrementally in the Middle East,” a person familiar with the White House’s discussions around the peace process said.

Jerry Wu and Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.

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Israel rejected a U.S.-backed peace plan for Gaza Sunday, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Israel will not withdraw from the enclave until Hamas has been “genuinely disarmed.”

In dismissing the 15-point plan drawn up by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, Netanyahu also said that as long as he is prime minister, “a Palestinian state will not be established” in Gaza or the West Bank.

The peace plan announced by the White House at the end of July would require Hamas to disarm and relinquish its governance in Gaza, while Israel would be required to withdraw its military forces from the territory.

Hamas has said that it would begin disarming, but in recent days an Israeli official said the country still had “serious security concerns.”

The rejection is a blow to peace negotiations the Trump administratoin has been brokering since September. The U.S. president had described the plan, now rejected by Israel, as a “critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government” and giving Israel “the security it deserves.”

Israel appears unlikely to pull back significant forces or make other concessions ahead of legislative elections scheduled for October. Netanyahu faces a tough reelection battle, with his far-right coalition partners urging him to keep up the pressure on Hamas and leave forces in Gaza. Opponents also accuse him of failing to prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, attack when Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 others hostage. Israel responded with a punishing military offensive that has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Netanyahu said on Sunday that he is now in discussions with U.S. officials about how to move forward. “They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some of which are unacceptable to us, and we know how to stand up to these things,” he said.

LONDON — Andy Burnham entered Downing Street with a promise to give hard-pressed voters “breathing space” on the cost of living. Now he must show he can deliver. 

At the top of his list is finding a way to reduce stubbornly high energy bills — even as the Iran-U.S. war forces up prices and ministers are under pressure to cut their own departmental budgets. The new prime minister knows any intervention must make a real impact for voters if he is to turn Labour’s fortunes around. 

“You need to make an emotional connection with people,” said one senior government official, granted anonymity to talk candidly about Whitehall thinking. 

Britain’s new prime minister has already made one bid to show voters he is serious about tackling the problem: Removing VAT from household electricity bills, something he announced on his first day in No. 10. 

The move will knock less than £4 off the average monthly bill, ends after one year, and comes with a price tag of £850 million. Downing Street said it will be paid for through so-far unspecified Whitehall savings. 

But Burnham and his new Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, promised that the intervention is just a start. Cutting VAT is a “down payment” ahead of the winter, Fahnbulleh said. 

That means ministers have just weeks before Burnham’s first budget this fall to figure out what, if anything, can really ease the burden — and how to pay for it. 

Salami slicing 

“The fiscal space is going to be a challenge, and that is the case for any government,” said Sam Alvis, associate director for environment, energy security, and nature at the Labour-aligned Institute for Public Policy Research think tank. 

That’s because any intervention to bring down energy bills will have to be funded from already under-pressure Whitehall departments. 

“This government is going to have a look at the budget. Whether it chooses to do some priorities differently — that is an open question,” Alvis said. 

One option for Burnham is to slice more charges from electricity bills, as he did with VAT. But any savings could be quickly wiped out if, as expected, the Middle East crisis pushes up wholesale gas prices.

Forecasters at Cornwall Insight predict that average annual household bills will rise by two percent this fall, even after the VAT intervention. 

That leaves Burnham facing the same problems as the man he replaced, Keir Starmer. 

Starmer cut £150 off yearly bills last November by shifting some so-called green levies, used to fund a clean energy scheme, onto general taxation. By the summer, that cut had been swallowed up by higher prices driven by the Strait of Hormuz crisis. 

Nonetheless, Alvis said, this approach remains Burnham’s most realistic option. 

“We are now in a bit of a scenario of salami slicing, where you’re aggregating lots and lots of smaller bits,” he said. “There’s no one big thing that you can do that’s going to take over £100 off bills. So, it’s about accumulating all those things that you think you could possibly do in one go, so it becomes sizable and noticeable.” 

Decisions, decisions 

One of those options, proposed by the think tank Nesta and reportedly being considered by Burnham, involves shifting further green levies from electricity bills onto tax.  

It identified another £42 of savings from a yearly bill, costing the Treasury £1.7 billion per year for a decade. 

Every small cut helps consumers, insists Andrew Sissons, Nesta’s director of sustainable futures. The think tank has also proposed knocking £22 a year off bills by shifting the standing charge on gas — currently a fixed daily fee — onto the unit rate, which changes depending on how much energy a home uses. That would take a year to implement and would not cost the government a penny, Nesta says. 

But such moves must be accompanied by larger interventions if voters are to feel the benefit, he added. 

“The amount you’d need to cut people’s energy bills … for it to feel like a real difference is quite substantial,” he said. The government, he argued, should aim for a “big package.”  

If the government aims for larger changes, they would come with even greater costs.  

Nesta has suggested a one-off move to wipe out electricity debt, removing some bailout costs currently funded through bills, taking total annual bill savings to £130. But the Treasury would have to find £2.7 billion to fund that. 

“[We] shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are fiscal trade-offs. But if the government wants to prioritize energy bills, then this is the kind of step it needs to take,” Sissons added, pointing to their proposed levy change alongside the VAT cut.  

Things take time  

Net-zero policies will, ministers hope, bring down bills for good. But large-scale changes take years to implement. 

“Realistically, the only way to deeply, deeply help people is to get them solar panels, is to get them an EV [electric vehicle], potentially heat pumps in some houses as well,” said Alvis. 

This is another reason to opt for “salami slicing”, he said: To “alter the balance of electricity and gas prices, so that those clean technologies stack up and save people even more money.”  

Alex Bevan, a research fellow at the Future Governance Forum, agreed that big savings attached to the shift to green energy were still a way off.  

“There aren’t quick workarounds on whichever form of energy you choose to generate and deploy,” he said. But government must nonetheless “lock in the benefits [of clean energy],” he argued. 

The same official quoted above stressed that no decision had yet been made on how the government would intervene on bills. Asked whether the government favored a series of small policies or one big intervention, they said: “It doesn’t have to be binary. … It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”  

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “The energy secretary’s focus is bringing bills down for good. We will tackle the cost of living to make life’s essentials affordable again and bring back hope.”

For now, Alvis insisted, Burnham has one thing going for him: He can operate in the knowledge voters accept international issues are pushing up costs. 

“The political point I would make is: By doing your best effort, you give yourself the space to have a conversation with the public,” he said. 

Wer regiert die Welt – und was treibt sie an? In unserem regelmäßigen Machthaber-Spezial geht es um die mächtigsten und umstrittensten Politikerinnen und Politiker unserer Zeit. Wir zeigen, wie sie denken, entscheiden – und was das für uns bedeutet. Eine Politikerin oder Politiker, ein Blick hinter die Kulissen der Macht.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. ⁠Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.⁠

Mehr von Host und POLITICO Executive Editor Gordon Repinski:
Instagram: ⁠@gordon.repinski⁠ | X: ⁠@GordonRepinski⁠.
POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
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