The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a report this week documenting how major U.S. banks closed accounts, rejected financing, and screened out conservative businesses, Trump merchandise sellers, and Christian organizations over politics and faith.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould said the findings left little room for spin. President Donald Trump ordered the review as part of a push to end politically motivated debanking.
Breitbart News reported that the OCC examined nearly 100,000 complaints, hundreds of individual decisions, and about 420,000 pages of bank records covering 2020 through September 2025. All nine national banks under review kept policies that restricted services or raised scrutiny based on reputation risk or industry type.
JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Wells Fargo, and Capital One drew citations for completed denials or closures tied to political or religious views. Citibank and Bank of America cases centered more on industry bans and other reputation-risk calls.
Gould did not say much in his accompanying statement.
“Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,”
The report names no bank-specific enforcement penalties. It does lay bare a pattern of subjective judgments that left lawful customers without basic financial access.
The paper trail is not abstract. Bank employees wrote down why they cut people off.
PNC declined a credit line to a media company in late 2021 after staff pointed to the owners’ conservative views and affiliations. One internal note made the values test plain.
“I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values,”
WePay, the Silicon Valley payments firm JPMorgan Chase acquired in 2017, closed a Trump merchandise seller’s account in February 2021. An employee listed “MAGA and Trump-related items” among the violations. The firm’s screening list included “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”
In July 2021, WePay closed another account raising funds for a legal challenge by a “devout Christian” to certain anti-discrimination laws. Internal records labeled a religious nonprofit a “[r]ight wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric.”
JPMorgan later told the New York Post it identified problems at WePay, corrected them, and that the business no longer operates. A spokesperson also said the bank’s policies prohibit discrimination based on political or religious views. The OCC found neither WePay nor JPMorgan had formal written standards for judging alleged promotion of hate or violence.
Between 2021 and 2023, JPMorgan repeatedly declined commercial services to a conservative retailer. Internal records later saw edits that stripped out “right-wing” and similar descriptors. In 2023, a JPMorgan employee removed references calling an organization “right wing” and “religious” from a tracking system.
Wells Fargo pressed a payment intermediary to rethink a religious nonprofit and supplied information on the group’s views on same-sex marriage, after which the relationship ended. When asked how it spotted problematic merchants, Wells Fargo pointed staff to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and BloodMoney.org.
A grand jury indicted the SPLC on fraud charges earlier this year, a detail that only sharpens questions about banks treating activist scorecards as risk tools. Readers who track official records that clash with public narratives have seen that pattern before, including when Rand Paul unveiled Fauci diary entries at odds with the story sold to the country.
In 2024, Wells Fargo staff reviewing a prospective firearms customer wrote about politics in the supervisor’s chair.
“Under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry.”
The bank declined those opportunities. An unnamed card network also sent Wells Fargo a list of about 60 potentially problematic merchants after a highly publicized, politicized event. The OCC identified card networks as a catalyst for some bank investigations.
TD Bank prepared to reject an anti-immigration nonprofit’s second PPP application over a claimed conflict with TD values and an SPLC designation. The nonprofit withdrew as ineligible. TD also flagged pro-life and faith-based organizations for reputation-risk concerns.
BMO required a firearms-related customer to keep tactical-product sales below 30 percent of total sales and called for transitioning customers out if they refused the bank’s firearms standards. U.S. Bank closed an aviation company’s accounts after digging up an old report alleging participation in a controversial government program.
Capital One’s restrictions hit groups across the spectrum. One business line treated partisan activity as presumptively high reputation risk and rejected abortion-rights organizations, a public education group whose political arm endorsed Democrats, and a gun-rights group.
Industry restriction policies covered Arctic oil and gas, coal mining and coal-fired power, firearms and ammunition, private prisons and detention facilities, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and digital assets. Digital-asset limits often tied to financial-crime concerns. Other bans tracked politics and activist heat.
Citibank declined financing for a coal-dependent electricity provider and refused an IPO tied to a firearms business that failed the bank’s gun-sales standards. In June 2025, Citi announced it would eliminate its firearms policy and bar discrimination based on political affiliation.
Bank of America wound down private-prison relationships. Employees described a longtime customer as financially sound even while discussing political scrutiny and advocacy pressure. In 2025, a senior public policy leader said the earlier exit reflected “changing policymaker attitudes.” Months into Trump’s return, the bank sought to restore the relationship even though reputation-risk factors had not materially changed.
That kind of pivot under new political weather is familiar to taxpayers who watch large institutions adjust only after the referee changes. It also fits a broader accountability theme seen when the Treasury hit Bank of America with major fines over anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures.
JPMorgan told Bloomberg it agreed with the administration on a broader point: years of operating under a regulatory environment that second-guessed decisions fed a culture of caution across banking, and that system needs fixing. The bank also said WePay’s process “did not meet our expectations.”
Federal regulators have already moved to strip reputation risk out of routine bank supervision. In April, the OCC and FDIC issued a final rule barring supervisory criticism based on reputation risk and barring pressure to deny services over protected beliefs or politically disfavored lawful activities. In June 2025, the Federal Reserve announced it would remove reputation risk from examinations.
OCC guidance issued in September 2025 says the agency will consider politicized or unlawful debanking when reviewing relevant licensing applications and when evaluating banks under the Community Reinvestment Act. The OCC is also weighing additional rules, folding debanking records into merger and community-lending reviews, and creating a path for customers to obtain confidential supervisory information in private litigation.
An unnamed bank made a fair-access representation in a recent merger application. Public approval in December 2025 of PNC’s acquisition of FirstBank included language that restrictions would rest on individualized, objective, risk-based analysis rather than environmental, social-impact, or reputation-risk judgments.
On the same Wednesday the OCC report landed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced it would investigate compliance with federal consumer financial laws and address consumer harm from these practices.
The Bank Policy Institute, speaking for the industry after banks referred questions its way, said lenders support fair access and clear standards.
“The banking industry supports fair access to banking services and has been working to ensure that government regulations and policies enable banks to serve law-abiding customers,”
BPI also said it backs efforts to set consistent rules that promote access while keeping sound risk management, including the administration’s focus on material financial risk rather than reputational risk, and that it looks forward to work with the administration and Congress so political or religious beliefs do not unfairly block banking services.
The OCC’s core critique is straightforward. Banking decisions should rest on measurable, impartial, risk-based standards adopted in advance. Too often, banks leaned on guesses about public opinion, anticipated activist or shareholder blowback, and third-party advocacy lists.
Reliance on groups such as the SPLC and other nontraditional sources, the OCC said, injected more subjectivity and bias into reputation-risk calls. Customers who sold Trump gear, ran Christian nonprofits, organized around contested social issues, or worked in lawful firearms and energy businesses paid the price in closed accounts, lost credit lines, broken donation streams, and forced website changes.
Event-organizer posts cited in the review called Biden and Anthony Fauci “the enemy” and described Black Lives Matter as Marxist. Whatever one thinks of that rhetoric, the banking question is whether lawful speech and lawful commerce get a fair risk review, or a values veto. Private writings that later surface and contradict the public line have fueled similar distrust in other arenas, including when Fauci’s own diary showed a lower COVID death-rate estimate than the public heard.
Capital One’s sweep against partisan activity on more than one side shows the machinery can snare anyone once politics becomes a banking screen. That is cold comfort to the conservative and Christian customers who appear again and again in the completed denials.
Secure borders and lawful immigration remain core public demands, and banks flagging an anti-immigration nonprofit over “values” and an SPLC tag sit in the same accountability fight as high-profile enforcement cases, including when an Obama-appointed judge froze removal of an illegal immigrant shot in a Bronx ICE raid.
The OCC review does not claim every declined loan was pure viewpoint discrimination. It does show major institutions built systems that mixed real credit risk with political taste, religious discomfort, and fear of the wrong headlines.
For years, customers were told the problem was imaginary. The regulator’s own document haul now shows account closures, rejected financing, internal MAGA watch lists, and employee notes that treated mainstream conservative and Christian commitments as brand hazards.
Lawful Americans should not need a permission slip from a reputation committee to keep a bank account. When big banks turn political and religious tests into financial chokepoints, they invite the very rules and scrutiny they now say they want to avoid.
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