CFTC Chair Pushes for Clarity Act Passage Before August Recess

Michael Selig, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, sat down with Fox Business this week to deliver a message Congress needed to hear: the Clarity Act is nearly done, and it has to pass before lawmakers leave town for August. The crypto market-structure bill has been circling for months, missing its July 4 target, but Selig insisted the finish line is visible. "We're so close. We have to get this done," he said, his tone carrying the weight of someone who understands that legislative windows close fast and rarely reopen.

The stakes are real. The Clarity Act would carve up regulatory authority over digital assets between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission—a division the industry has been pushing for since before most people owned Bitcoin. The House passed it last summer. The Senate has not yet brought it to a floor vote. Some analysts are giving it even odds of passage before the August 7 recess, which means there is still a path, but the path is narrow. Lawmakers have warned privately that if this bill dies in the next few weeks, the next real opportunity to move it could be years away.

Selig, a Trump appointee confirmed in December, frames the Clarity Act as a matter of national survival. The current landscape is a patchwork of state regulations that, in his view, has left American crypto businesses at a disadvantage. "It's critical that we have a federal standard for crypto assets," he told Bartiromo. He listed the bill's three pillars—certainty, clarity, and consumer protection—and emphasized that it has support across party lines. But that bipartisan framing masks a real fight.

Democrats have inserted language into negotiations that addresses ethics concerns tied to President Trump, his family, and their crypto holdings. Selig characterized this as a distraction from the core work. "There's a little bit of creep into ethics and other issues, and they're just derailing the real opportunity to have a bipartisan bill," he said. Democrats counter that these provisions are about consumer protection, not partisan theater. The disagreement has become a sticking point, one of several. The bill has also drawn fire over illicit-finance rules and over a reopened section of the GENIUS Act—the stablecoin law—that concerns whether crypto exchanges can pay yield on stablecoin balances held by users.

Senator Cynthia Lummis, who leads the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee, has said her team aims to release final bill text and hold a vote before the month ends. The committee advanced the measure in a 15-9 vote, with two Democrats crossing over to join Republicans. That narrow margin suggests the bill has a coalition, but it is not overwhelming. The calendar is the real pressure. August recess is not a pause—it is a reset. When Congress returns in the fall, the legislative agenda will have shifted, priorities will have changed, and a bill that seemed close in July can become impossible by September.

Selig also touched on other CFTC business during the interview. Prediction markets have exploded in volume—Kalshi and Polymarket combined processed $24 billion over the past year—and the agency has proposed rules for the sector while suing nine states over jurisdiction. He noted that during recent U.S. strikes on Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, crypto held its value and functioned as a hedge while the agency worked to keep oil and derivatives markets stable. But the Clarity Act remains the immediate test of the CFTC's influence and the crypto industry's ability to move Congress. Everything now depends on released text, a Senate vote, and a calendar that leaves only weeks before the recess begins.