A new regulation looking to tackle the problems associated with supply chains to help the economy and businesses stay competitive has received approval from the House of Representatives. 

Specifically, the piece of legislation was reportedly passed without including a provision that the crypto sphere had criticized for equipping the Treasury Secretary authority with the power to shut down exchanges. 

The House of Representatives – via a 222-210 vote in favor on February 4th – reportedly passed the America COMPETES Act mostly along party lines.

The provision in the initial proposal from the Connecticut Representative Jim Himes would seemingly have enabled the Treasury Secretary to possess reduced limits, regarding financial institutions surveillance over suspected transactions, associated with money laundering, with the bill not available for public feedback. 

Nonetheless, lawmakers reportedly made some adjustments to the wording earlier this week to safeguard restrictions currently under by the Bank Secrecy Act. 

Before Himes essentially made partial changes to his provision, non-profit crypto policy advocate group Coin Center reportedly shared some criticisms towards the legislation, for potentially making it possible for the Treasury Secretary to have “unchecked and unilateral power” to prohibit exchanges and different financial entities from interacting with cryptocurrency transactions. 

“The Treasury Department should not have unilateral authority to make sweeping economic decisions without providing full due process of rulemaking. This draconian provision would not help America compete with China, it would employ China’s heavy-handed playbook to snuff out financial innovation in our own country.” Budd further claimed via a statement made on January 27th.