An event organizer posted on social media that Black Lives Matter was run by "Marxists" and that President Biden and Anthony Fauci were "the enemy." Bank staff read the posts, called them "an incitement of hate," and cut the organizer off.
That's one case in a federal report showing that America's biggest banks spent the Biden years deciding which Americans had acceptable opinions.
On October 14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans," a 47-page report. It found that all nine of the nation's largest banks kept policies from 2020 through September 2025 that let them deny services based on customers' political or religious beliefs. The nine are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank.
Together, those nine banks hold $12.7 trillion, or 76% of all assets in institutions the OCC regulates. This was the core of the American banking system.
"Today's report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation's largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses," said Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould.
Investigators went through nearly 100,000 complaints and about 50,000 internal bank documents, roughly 420,000 pages. The common thread was "reputation risk," a label vague enough to justify cutting off anyone who might bring bad press, protesters, or angry calls from left-wing activist groups and Biden-era regulators. The OCC found the banks "largely lacked clear and measurable standards" for any of it.
JPMorgan's payment subsidiary, WePay, built a screening list that flagged "MAGA," "Make America Great," and "America First," adding some of those terms after January 6. It shut down a merchant selling Trump merchandise, and an employee explained it plainly: "MAGA and Trump-related items are part of it." WePay had no formal written standards for any of these calls.
JPMorgan also turned away a conservative-leaning retailer from 2021 to 2023. Its internal documents called the retailer's customers "extreme clients." Meanwhile, it kept a wealthy client facing drug and weapons charges, and regulators say the money that client brought in appeared to influence the decision.
Christians got the same treatment. PNC refused credit to a media company after noting that an owner's foundation "has funded several Christian conservative groups." Wells Fargo pressured a payment processor to drop a religious nonprofit over its position on same-sex marriage. WePay closed an account raising money for a "devout Christian" challenging anti-discrimination laws in court.
Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who served as Trump's religious freedom ambassador, saw it happen to his own nonprofit. Chase closed the National Committee for Religious Freedom's account in 2022, three weeks after it opened. According to Brownback, the bank then offered to reconsider if the group disclosed its major donors.
Many of these decisions traced back to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Banks used its "hate group" labels to decide whom to drop. During the pandemic, that label helped TD Bank deny a COVID emergency loan to a nonprofit that pushes for limits on immigration.
In April, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on 11 counts, including wire fraud and four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank.
Gun owners never stood a chance. A Wells Fargo review warned that "under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry," and Wells Fargo turned down the gun businesses. Capital One rejected a gun-rights organization over "optics." Some banks wrote their own gun laws, conditioning loans on bank-imposed limits on magazine capacity and on sales to customers under 21.
Six entire industries were treated as untouchable: oil and gas exploration, coal mining, firearms and ammunition, detention facilities, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and digital assets. All of them are legal, and all of them make progressives uncomfortable.
Bank of America cut off private prison companies over "changing policymaker attitudes." A few months into Trump's second term, once the policymakers had changed, it tried to bring one back.
The banks' defenders will point to Capital One turning down an abortion-rights group as outside its "risk appetite." A risk employee noted that the group's political contributions were "about 95% Democrat." That note shows the banks were tracking customers' party donations. The rest of the report shows who paid for it: Trump supporters, Christians, gun owners, energy workers, and a nonprofit seeking pandemic relief.
All nine banks now say they've revised their policies. The OCC found that some just "rebranded the risk as a 'franchise' or 'brand' risk," and that "no bank has fully and publicly acknowledged its past debanking decisions." Gould's verdict was "I am not confident that they will be enough."
JPMorgan dismissed the findings as "a limited number of historical interactions" and blamed "years of operating in a regulatory environment that often second-guessed decisions." Those second-guessing regulators worked for Joe Biden.
Acting CFPB Director Mark Paoletta was blunter. "It is appalling that these banks targeted American consumers for their political, social, or religious beliefs that did not align with the Biden Administration or its leftist allies," he said. "These thuggish tactics, which were also a defining feature of the Biden-Chopra CFPB, have no place in America." His bureau has opened its own investigation.
President Trump knew this firsthand, because banks cut off his own family after January 6. His administration has already stripped "reputation risk" out of federal bank examinations, adopted a rule barring regulators from pressuring banks to drop customers over it, and made debanking count against banks when they apply for licenses and in their community-lending ratings. His August 2025 executive order launched this investigation.
Penalties haven't been announced — yet. "Fair access to financial services is not a mantra," Gould said. "It is a mandate."
If one of these banks closed your account or turned you down, you can file a complaint with the OCC at HelpWithMyBank.gov or by calling 800-613-6743, and with the CFPB at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.
The nine banks that hold 76% of the system's assets spent five years treating Trump hats, Christian donors, and gun shops as threats. Now 420,000 pages of their own documents show it.