President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Americans on public assistance that they will no longer be able to wire money out of the U.S.
As seen below on the podcast ‘Human Events with Jack Posobiec,’ Bessent said: “For individuals who want to wire money out of the country, they’re gonna have to tick a box whether they are or are not on public assistance. And then we’re going to start pushing over the coming days and weeks that if you are on public assistance, you cannot wire money out of the country.”
Bessent added: “Because if you are wiring money out of the country and you’re on public assistance, it means one of two things: either you’re getting too much assistance that you don’t need for yourself and your family, the American people are generous to people who are seeking asylum, here we do not intend to support people in Mogadishu or to support terrorist organizations. Or the second thing it could mean is you’ve stolen the money, which is what we’re seeing prevailed here in Minnesota.”
[NOTE: Democratic Governor Tim Walz is currently under fire for a series of fraud schemes targeting Minnesota’s social services system, including daycare centers, that have occurred on his watch.]
Bessent: “For individuals who want to wire money out of the country, they’re gonna have to tick a box whether they are or are not on public assistance. Then we’re going to start pushing over the coming days and weeks that if you’re on public assistance, you cannot wire money out… pic.twitter.com/hiaBTDcT6m
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2026
The kind of federal control that Bessent describes targets the private wages of the poor, not specifically their benefits. SNAP benefits (which are maintained on EBT cards) cannot be moved or wired like money. But the Secretary’s view is that if there is enough money in an individual’s total budget to send some of it out of the country, then the portion of that budget coming from public assistance is too much — people should not, according to this view, possess a surplus of funds beyond what is necessary to meet their immediate domestic needs.
Catherine Rampell, economics editor at The Bulwark, responded to Bessent asking: “we’re doing capital controls now?” And Wonkette writer Marcie Jones replied, “But there is a solution, one can send the money through an anonymous crypto wallet.” Jones drily noted the reduction of crypto regulation during Trump 2.0, despite the fact that international drug cartels — an avowed Trump administration target — are major beneficiaries of crypto currencies.
Many are objecting not just to capital constraints on principle, characterizing the controls as authoritarian, but also asking why they only apply to lower income groups. One commenter taking this view wrote: “Y’all do realize this isn’t about fraud it’s about surveillance, right? First they test it on people you’re conditioned to hate. Then they normalize it. Then they roll the exact same tracking onto everyone else. Funny how there’s endless monitoring for poor people wiring money…but zero appetite to scrutinize corporations siphoning billions in taxpayer dollars overseas.”
Another replied with snark: “Does the same apply to corporate welfare recipients?”