The CCCA Gets New Life Thanks to a Presidential Endorsement

The proposed Credit Card Competition Act staged a comeback Tuesday with a huge boost from President Trump, who endorsed the bill on the Truth Social platform the previous day.

The President’s backing breathes new life into the bill, which has been bandied about Capitol Hill for years. The last major effort to pass the bill into law by attaching it to the Genius Act last year failed. After that setback, the consensus among payments experts was that the bill was going to die on the vine.

After the bill was reintroduced Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he expected it to be voted on before the current Congress adjourns next year. The CCCA, which is co-sponsored by Senators Roger Marshall and Dick Durbin and seeks to moderate merchants’ credit card acceptance costs, has never made it out of committee to be voted on by the Senate.

The latest developments have renewed optimism about the bill’s future. “We’re on Trump time now — and the Credit Card Competition Act has the best chance it’s ever had of becoming law,” Payton Fuller, Senator Marshall’s communications director, says by email. “Senator Marshall is grateful for President Trump’s support and is exploring every possible avenue to get this bill across the finish line.”

Vice President JD Vance endorsed the CCCA in his capacity as a senator from Ohio before the Trump Administration took office last year.

First introduced in 2022, the CCCA would require that credit card transactions offer merchants a choice of networks beyond Visa and Mastercard. Backers contend that the requirement would harness competitive network forces to lower the cost of swipe fees, which merchants define as interchange and network fees.

Merchant organizations argue the bill will also benefit consumers in the form of lower prices. The average family pays $1,200 more each year in higher prices because of swipe fees, according to the Merchants Payment Council.

“The President recognizes the drain on affordability swipe fees create,” says Doug Kantor, an executive committee member at the Merchants Payment Council and general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores. “The [Trump Administration] has been aware of this bill for a long time and follows these issues closely.” Trump’s endorsement of the CCCA “improves its chances of passage dramatically,” Kantor adds.

The unexpected revival of the CCCA drew a strong rebuke from the card-payments industry. The Electronic Payments Coalition counters that merchants are unlikely to pass along to consumers any savings from the CCCA in the form of lower prices.

“Study after study from respected economists, academics, independent think tanks, and even nonpartisan government agencies show these untested mandates will not lead to lower prices,” Richard Hunt, executive chairman of the Electronic Payments Coalition says in a statement.

Referring to the Durbin Amendment, a similar effort that passed into law in October 2011 and was aimed at debit card acceptance costs, Hunt added, “When corporate mega-stores and their lobbyists pushed through mandates on your debit card, they pocketed the money and ignored repeated promises to lower costs. Now they are at it again, pushing for more mandates just to pad their profits.”

To support its position, the EPC cites a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond that says 98% of retailers raised prices or left them flat after the Durbin Amendment passed.

“Americans trust our credit card system to process transactions smoothly and securely. They do not want this big government takeover of the credit card system,” Hunt argued.

While the credit card industry remains determined to defeat the CCCA, the bill’s revival appears to have caught it off guard, some payment experts say.

“I think large credit card issuers and Visa and Mastercard have been complacent and let the merchant lobby and critics of the credit card system on Capitol Hill frame the narrative, [and] they may pay a steep price,” says Eric Grover, principal at Intrepid Ventures, by email. “The CCCA would utterly devastate Visa’s and Mastercard’s variable acquirer credit processing and licensing fees.”

Grover adds that while the CCCA appeared to be “dead in the water last week,” President Trump’s endorsement “all but assures that it will get a vote and significantly increases the chances of it passing and becoming law.”