In a recent interview with Washington Watch, Family Research Council’s Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena González discussed federal regulator reports showing the nine largest banks in America deliberately closed accounts belonging to conservative individuals and organizations.
Americans rely on banks and other financial institutions every day, and they expect these institutions to serve everyone regardless of their religious convictions or political positions. But over the past five years, congressional testimony and news stories have highlighted how federal officials and financial institutions targeted conservative organizations through debanking. Conservatives deemed “high risk” could have their bank accounts closed without warning and without explanation.
On October 14, federal regulators released a major report showing that America’s largest financial institutions had internal policies and communications targeting conservatives for debanking. Officials now say they plan to investigate whether these institutions broke any consumer protection laws.
González discussed the report in a recent Washington Watch interview, saying:
“It’s hard to think of anything more troubling than the idea that your bank might be spying on you and deciding whether or not they’re going to keep your account open or close it based on your political donations, based on your nonprofit donations, based on your banking activities . . . These nine banks, which represent a majority of the accounts that people hold in the United States, had policies in place internally that went after organizations and in some cases turned off the ability for organizations to receive or process donations. So this has a massive chilling effect. And of course, this is something we didn’t know that was happening towards the end of 2020 through 2025, which if you do the math, the majority of that time was within the Biden administration. So, there are a lot of unanswered questions.”
In 2021, Family Council’s credit card processor WePay — a company owned by JPMorgan Chase — terminated our account after designating our organization as “high risk.”
At 10:29 AM on Wednesday, July 7, 2021, our office received a terse email from WePay saying, “Unfortunately, we can no longer support your business. We wish you all the luck in the future, and hope that you find a processor that better fits your payment processing needs.”
Within 60 seconds, Family Council could no longer accept donations online. The processor never explained why we were labeled “high risk.” All we could do is speculate that our conservative principles and our public policy work might have had something to do with the decision to close our account.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. As the OCC report illustrates, many other organizations had similar experiences with WePay, Bank of America, and other major financial institutions.
Family Council is grateful to the many people and organizations who have stood up against debanking in recent years. After all, banks that are too big to fail are also too big to discriminate.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
