DCUC Urges Senate Agriculture Committee to Reject Durbin–Marshall Amendment

Anthony Hernandez

​The Defense Credit Union Council (DCUC) is urging Senate Agriculture  Committee Chairman John Boozman and Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar to reject any effort to include the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) in the Committee’s upcoming digital assets market structure markup scheduled for January 27, 2026.
 
In a letter sent this morning to the committee, DCUC strongly opposes yesterday’s attempts by Senators Dick Durbin, Roger Marshall, and Peter Welch to attach the controversial interchange proposal to legislation governing digital assets.
 
“This controversial interchange amendment has no place in a digital asset policy bill. The CCCA is fundamentally about credit card routing and interchange fees – topics squarely under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Committee, not the Agriculture Committee. It has never been considered through regular order by the Banking Committee, where issues of payments, interchange, and consumer credit rightly belong,” wrote DCUC.
 
DCUC warned that attaching the Durbin–Marshall proposal to a bipartisan digital assets framework is a backdoor maneuver that undermines the integrity of the legislative process and bypasses appropriate scrutiny for a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. payments system.
 
Beyond process concerns, DCUC stressed that the Credit Card Competition Act would harm consumers and the military community, while delivering no meaningful benefits to cardholders.
 
“Government-mandated interchange routing changes do not benefit consumers,” says DCUC Chief Advocacy Officer Jason Stverak. “We’ve seen this before with the Durbin debit interchange cap, where promised savings never reached consumers and instead flowed to large retailers.”
 
DCUC cited research from the Congressional Research Service showing that 98% of merchants raised prices or kept them the same following the Durbin debit caps, as well as findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond indicating retailers imposed new restrictions rather than passing savings along at the checkout.
 
At the same time, DCUC cautioned that reduced interchange revenue would directly weaken credit unions’ ability to invest in fraud prevention, cybersecurity, rewards programs, and member services. For defense credit unions, those funds also support military-specific benefits such as low-interest, no-fee credit cards, deployment relief loans, free financial counseling, and emergency assistance programs.
 
“If adopted, this amendment would reduce access to safe, affordable credit and weaken fraud protections for military members, young servicemembers, and veterans,” DCUC President/CEO Anthony Hernandez warns. “It would shift costs onto consumers and community financial institutions while delivering a windfall to large retail chains.”
 
DCUC also raised serious concerns about increased fraud risk. By forcing transactions onto the cheapest available networks, the proposal would prioritize cost over security, potentially routing sensitive payment data through networks with weaker fraud protections.
 
Researchers at Texas A&M estimate the proposal’s routing mandates could double annual card fraud losses to $20 billion over the next decade, an especially troubling risk for military cardholders, including those deployed overseas in high-risk environments.
 
“This major policy change should be debated openly and on its own merits, not shoehorned into unrelated digital asset legislation,” adds Stverak.
 
DCUC urged Senate leaders to keep the January 27 markup narrowly focused on digital asset regulation and to reject any unrelated interchange mandates.
 
“By opposing the inclusion of the Credit Card Competition Act, lawmakers will support good governance, protect consumers, and preserve access to safe, affordable credit for millions of Americans,” Hernandez says.

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