On May 21, 2026, Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska and Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act, backed by sixteen bipartisan co-sponsors. The bill targets a one-million-Bitcoin federal reserve within five years, budget-neutral, with no taxpayer spending. Only seized assets and existing holdings count.
The gap between the headline and the substance matters here. Sen. Cynthia Lummis's BITCOIN Act called for active Treasury purchases: 200,000 BTC per year for five years, funded by a revaluation of federal gold reserves. ARMA doesn't go there. It's a deliberately diluted version, engineered to move through a Congress that won't touch any bill that adds to a national deficit already sitting at $39 trillion, according to U.S. Treasury data.
328,372 BTC: The Real Starting Point
The U.S. federal government is already the world's largest state holder of Bitcoin. Treasury figures updated in February 2026 show 328,372 BTC in custody, accumulated through criminal seizures including FTX, Silk Road, and related cases. At an average price of $77,277 recorded on May 18, 2026, per CoinGecko data, that's $25.4 billion. Not a single coin has been sold since Trump's executive order of March 6, 2025, which froze disposals and formally established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the Presidential Council on Digital Assets, told the Consensus 2026 conference in Miami on May 6: “the formal announcement will come in the next few weeks.” The White House, he explained, had resolved the legal question that had blocked the SBR's structure for over a year.
Bitcoin in government custody by country (BTC, May 2026)
Source: Bitcoin Treasuries · Arkham Intelligence · SpazioCrypto analysis · May 2026
A Reserve Without Buying: Does ARMA Add Up?
Functionally, at first glance, a strategic reserve that buys nothing looks like a political gesture. The ARMA logic is more nuanced. U.S. Treasury agencies (DEA, FBI, U.S. Marshals) seize Bitcoin every year from criminal operations. Under ARMA, those coins wouldn't be auctioned off but retained in reserve. Between 2018 and 2023, the federal government sold or scheduled the sale of over 200,000 BTC at prices well below current levels. Had those coins been held, their value today would add roughly $15 billion to the national balance sheet. The counterfactual is written into the blockchain.
Two competing bills are running in parallel. Lummis's BITCOIN Act proposes active purchases: 200,000 BTC per year for five years, financed through a revaluation of federal gold reserves. ARMA targets a “neutral reserve”: hold what you have, stop selling it, accumulate through seizures. For anyone tracking the Bitcoin store-of-value narrative on SpazioCrypto, the difference is between active and passive monetary policy.
Sen. Lummis's official comment is on X: read recent posts by @SenLummis on ARMA.
Every month without a clear framework is another month where American investors are exposed and American innovators are left guessing. I didn't spend years writing the Clarity Act to watch us keep kicking the can down the road.
— Senator Cynthia Lummis (@SenLummis) May 24, 2026
Patrick Witt described ARMA as “version 2.0” of the SBR project in a statement at Consensus 2026, confirming the White House had reviewed the legal implications. ARMA's practical advantage over the Lummis BITCOIN Act: it could actually pass the Senate before the November 2026 midterms. No public spending, no deficit increase, no opening for critics to say the government is “buying crypto with taxpayer money.” The political architecture is designed precisely to neutralize that objection.
For markets, the real question is whether one million BTC “from seizures” is credible. At the current pace of federal confiscations, estimated at 15,000 to 30,000 BTC per year by Arkham Intelligence, reaching one million would take decades, not five years. The math doesn't close, unless the government starts buying or retaining assets from other programs. Full coverage of U.S. regulatory developments continues on SpazioCrypto. The legislative progress in Congress is publicly trackable.
With the November 2026 midterms approaching, the window to convert ARMA into law is narrow. Congressional observers say the Clarity Act remains the primary legislative priority. The Bitcoin reserve can wait, say the skeptics. Bitcoin, for its part, trades at $76,000.
