Federal Crypto Task Force Bill Aims to Fill DOJ Enforcement Gap Left by Trump

Published by James Harris on June 11, 2026June 11, 2026

Bipartisan lawmakers have introduced the Federal Cryptocurrency Theft Enforcement and Coordination Act, a bill that would create a DOJ-led task force pulling together the FBI, DHS, and Treasury to investigate crypto fraud and give victims a single place to report losses. The backdrop is not abstract: Americans lost $11.3 billion to cryptocurrency fraud in 2025, a 21 percent increase in complaint volume over the prior year, with investment scams accounting for $7.2 billion of that total.

The timing is entangled with a specific institutional gap the bill’s sponsors are careful not to name too loudly. The Trump administration disbanded the DOJ’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team in early 2025, arguing it had been used to regulate the industry through litigation rather than catch criminals. That logic was convenient for an administration trying to signal friendliness to the crypto industry, but it left enforcement genuinely fragmented across agencies with overlapping and inconsistent jurisdictions. The new bill is, in practical terms, an attempt to rebuild enforcement capacity under a different political framing: this is about protecting victims, not regulating protocols. Whether that reframe survives committee is another question.

Americans over 60 filed 44,555 complaints and lost $4.43 billion, which means elder fraud alone exceeds the entire annual GDP of some small economies and gives the bill a constituency that transcends crypto politics.

The Enforcement Gap in Context

The broader enforcement picture is messier than the bill’s clean framing suggests. TRM Labs estimates that wallets linked to illegal activity received $158 billion in cryptocurrency in 2025, up from $64.5 billion the year before, driven primarily by sanctions evasion and nation-state actors rather than retail scams. A task force oriented around victim complaints and local law enforcement training is not built to address state-sponsored sanctions evasion at that scale; those are different problems requiring different tools. What the bill would plausibly improve is the retail fraud pipeline, where the FBI’s Operation Level Up has already demonstrated that proactive victim notification works, saving an estimated $225.8 million in 2025 alone.

For exchanges and compliance teams, a coordinated federal task force with a standardized playbook for local law enforcement would reduce the current situation where investigators in different jurisdictions handle crypto theft cases with wildly inconsistent competence. That has real operational implications for asset recovery timelines. The bill still needs committee passage or attachment to a larger legislative vehicle, and prior efforts at this kind of coordination, including the Joint Ransomware Task Force created in 2021, have tended to operate with narrower mandates than their initial scope suggested.