Former White House advisor: Trump is still interested in buying Bitcoin, but faces legal obstacles.

Former White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said President Trump still wants the U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve to buy BTC on the open market, but legal constraints have so far blocked purchases since the reserve was created by a March 2025 executive order that consolidated seized government bitcoin and directed the Treasury and Commerce departments to find “budget-neutral” acquisition strategies. No such strategy has been published and no open-market buys have been announced. Witt said direct purchases are legally questionable because Congress controls federal spending, and that concerns over buying prompted lawmakers to add language to the National Defense Authorization Act barring such purchases; he is pushing to secure permission and authorization. Making the reserve permanent is harder still, since a standalone bill would be extremely difficult to pass in a divided Congress, and without legislation the reserve rests on an executive order that a future president could revoke.