Cynthia Lummis calls for US to accumulate Bitcoin openly while other nations buy quietly

Senator Cynthia Lummis wants the United States to stop pretending Bitcoin isn’t a strategic asset and start buying it in the open. Her argument is straightforward: other countries are already quietly stacking sats, and America is falling behind by not doing the same thing, loudly and by law.

The Wyoming Republican has been beating this drum for years now, but her latest push centers on the BITCOIN Act, reintroduced as S.954 on March 11, 2025. The legislation would direct the US Treasury to acquire 1 million Bitcoin over five years, purchasing 200,000 Bitcoin annually, then hold those assets for a minimum of 20 years.

What the BITCOIN Act actually proposes

One million Bitcoin represents roughly 5% of Bitcoin’s total supply. The senator has deliberately modeled the reserve after the US gold reserves, framing digital assets as the next evolution of strategic national holdings. The acquired Bitcoin would be stored in decentralized secure vaults across the country, built to comply with statutory cybersecurity requirements.

Lummis has emphasized that purchases should be conducted openly to limit market fluctuations, a notable contrast to what she describes as other nations accumulating Bitcoin quietly.

Lummis originally introduced the BITCOIN Act as S.4912 on July 31, 2024. The reintroduction in 2025 signals that this isn’t a one-off publicity stunt. It’s a sustained legislative campaign.

She’s called the initiative a “Louisiana Purchase moment” for the country, drawing a parallel to the 1803 land deal that doubled the size of the United States for what turned out to be a bargain.

The political landscape around a Bitcoin reserve

President Trump signed an executive order initiating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve funded by forfeited Bitcoin, essentially directing that seized crypto assets be preserved rather than auctioned off. The senator’s legislation aims to codify that executive action into law, making it harder for a future administration to reverse course.

In January 2026, Lummis publicly expressed concerns about Department of Justice liquidations of seized Bitcoin, arguing the government shouldn’t be squandering strategic assets.

The Mined in America Act, introduced in March 2026, aims to bolster domestic Bitcoin mining while building infrastructure to support the proposed reserve.

White House advisers hinted in May 2026 at forthcoming updates regarding the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, though they tied progress to the successful passage of Lummis’s proposed legislation.

Lummis announced in early 2026 that she would not seek re-election, with her Senate term ending in January 2027.

What this means for investors

If the US government commits to purchasing 1 million Bitcoin on a fixed schedule, that’s 200,000 Bitcoin per year being absorbed by a single buyer. Countries like El Salvador have already adopted Bitcoin into their national policy, but the US doing the same thing carries a fundamentally different weight in global markets.

A 20-year mandatory holding period means the government would be locked into its position through multiple market cycles. And there’s the concentration risk: putting 5% of Bitcoin’s total supply under government control introduces a new variable that decentralization advocates may find uncomfortable, even if the vaults are distributed geographically.

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