I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should not be at the whims of private organizations.
I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should not be at the whims of private organizations.
Is a payment processor operated by the Federal Reserve good enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Well, it probably would be, except guess who killed it in favor of a crypto scheme? https://www.jitumaster.com/2025/06/us-president-signs-execut...
I agree about the PO though. Social media shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise either.
Is there another source that says what exactly happened in that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th that had anything to do with payments.
[0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions nothing about the program being slowed down (just announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch of new signed on banks).
0: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/28/2025-05...
I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even changed recently. Your source is the only one about this, and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard of.
I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.
A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.
The banks have longstanding relationships with payment processors but they aren’t stupid. The duopoly has fat margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier initiatives like Zelle.
Ugh, they killed FedNow too? That hadn’t hit my radar. Why a waste.
FedNow has not been diminished through policy, still full speed ahead.
I don't think so?
Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it seems like it just mandates electronic payments and disallows paper checks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/mode...
Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail.
I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority?
> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.
The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.
Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
But how does mandatory guidance not impair the authority of an agency?
The agency is no longer allowed to do something against the guidance! Or the Order must not be ordering some action?
Government agencies in the executive branch don't have independent authority. They work for the president, and an EO isn't much different than the email you get from your boss directing you to do work a certain way.
An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.
My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.
Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.
You're conflating authority, the authorization to do something, with autonomy - the ability to use that authority at your own personal discretion. The law grants a regulatory agency the authority to do something that they would not otherwise be able to do, like nationally ban widgets. But the law does not also inherently grant them to the autonomy to do so entirely at their own discretion. For agencies under the Executive branch, the President is free to direct them to utilize their authority at his discretion.
It's the law that must not be ordering some action. Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency must do something, then an EO cannot override that law and direct them not to do that thing.
You can be almost certain these EOs are composed in tandem with LLMs.
And its okay because the federal employees who need to know what these say will just ask their LLM what it says! /s
Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)
If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.
What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some abstractive layer through another entity? I don't understand why the answer would be 'no for these reasons'.
The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same structure: they provide a retail interface and then handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary network (effectively a centralized database). To interface with the financial system, they provide a mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone actually directly using FedNow in any meaningful sense for retail payments.
Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a routing and account number posted. You'd go into your bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and everything would probably work out.
Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.
There are over a thousand different companies affiliated with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"
I thought FedNow was for settlement between banks, not a consumer-facing service. That would be a "Central Bank Digital Currency": https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
There were some bills on the subject, Republicans opposed to a CBDC to demonstrate their libertarian credentials:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1430...
HR-1919 passed the house, but it's not clear if "they" intend to bring it up for vote in the Senate.
People have submitted comments to the gov for using XRP as a mechanism, but AI tells me that FedNow is not killed or being replaced.
That article is XRP-pumping misinformation. Like almost 100% of content related to Ripple.
This is amazing.
I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?
This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.
Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.
Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.
I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.
Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
But what happens when the Gov decides they don't want to fund it anymore? Or the gov decides something shouldn't be funded.. Say truckers on strike, or wiki-leaks? Well then boom we have the same game, just a different player.
that's already happening? are you going to be funding your own vaccine research?
I'm not trying to take away from the thrust of your point. But pragmatically it seems like it could be in the scope of libraries to maintain some $4/mo prepaid SIMs to facilitate people signing up for new online accounts. Win-win for serving both the poor and people who care about privacy.
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None of what you say is inherent in a public service.
The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.
The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.
Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's much better then what I've experienced in other states.
I was under the impression that government sites having "business hours" had as much or more to do with their backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.
Anyway, I agree that government provided services functioning as you described would be intolerable, but disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?
I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services like email or payment processing become requirements for modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.
My local city runs a water heater rental company. It provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run, valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.
The US Digital Service made a number of good web services for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't close at night.
There are many times where governments do a bad job of things, and times where they do a good job. They're just institutions made of people, but they have no other default orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service you're just imagining, as though they would obviously happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.
May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance of your world. You could meet the many humans who are already doing so, working to improve it, and learning something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you how much good work is being done.
You might also then be able to help prevent others from implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as obvious or foregone conclusions.
Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many modern governments is that they don't do. They get some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities outright & ongoingly.
Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.
We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government. But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll redisocver the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing critically can give way to a some will & make happen.
It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and residents has to be on the short list for core competencies of any government, but we outsource even that.
> US-treasury direct
Ok but this one is good. And it works because it’s a tool they need to generate revenue
It's better now, but during the era of the on-screen keyboard it was atrocious.
Further invalidating the original objection that the site would be unmaintained.
I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.
But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.
> looks like it's from 2005
Fantastic. Really fast pages, simple forms, no Js. trendy is not what I want from my government service site.
> There will never be an app
Good. I want more websites and less apps on my phone. That also helps me trust the security more.
I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work better, let us abandon it!
Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense, but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it better, or when making it better would be a waste of resources. And neither is case here.
In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits, trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email. It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would otherwise have to waste in line.
So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.
> Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself
That’s a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut on certain types of postal services but in exchange they must serve EVERY permanent address without price discrimination.
No private company has to do that, nor would any sane profit maximising company want to.
It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.
Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
For the sake of reducing complexity in an already very complex world, I'd rather that it be illegal to require an email address to sign up for an account (or, alternatively, make it illegal to require an account for things like making a reservation at a restaurant) then being provided with an email by the USPS.
Doubly so given the interactions that I've had with digital services provided by my country's government and the bad (and in several cases extremely bad) experiences that I've had with them.
To be clear - I don't object to e.g. an address from the USPS complementing my existing email - I just don't want to be forced to use it for anything due to it being given some special properties that normal email providers aren't.
> Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
No because these things are genuinely useful. As much as people lament that we are going cashless, it's very convenient to be able to just carry one card and it's genuinely useful to just give my email as an identifier when registering for stuff.
Regulating their necessity means forcing people to accept cash and then using this as a reason why MasterCard and Visa should be allowed exist. In practice if something is that ingrained into daily interaction, then it should have something like the common carrier rules, set the fee to a static percentage of the transaction and that's it. The current 50% profit margins rent-seeking approach is just inefficient.
I completely agree with a lot of what you said! I'm not against technology in general or think that things like email aren't useful.
I think my argument is harder to make for payment processors, but in the case of email, it is preferable to not need an email address to create an account (even if it's convenient to have the option), and have other identifiers that can be used, like OAuth using an existing account or phone number, for instance.
Or, like I said, even better if you don't even need to create an account to participate in a one-time transaction (instead of a service relationship) with an entity.
The USPS and state DMVs should also collaborate on the novel role of identity management. Right now if you lose your phone, half of your life disappears because Google won't even log you into the email address that contains every "lost my password" redirect without 2FA on a new device. This is a bad scene. We need boring old meatspace ways to establish, re-establish, and federate our identity as a real person. Something that demands that I wait in line, that I show them a utility bill or drivers' license, that I confirm with a retina scan or fingerprint printed out on a sheet of paper that nobody else has access to. Something that is only trackable in one direction, from which you can generate a new identity if one is compromised. This is so close to the functional role of the "Credit card number" that you may as well tack bank transfer verification on there.
The One Digital Identity Service To Rule Them All is always vulnerable to mass hacking. We need to connect it with something slower, something more private, and the interface to that slow identity needs to be something that already has a branch open in the middle of nowhere.
Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.
pros:
- privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are. mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.
- no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you move, your email points to the new physical address automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years after you move).
cons:
- goods being sent to gmail addresses
Just thinking out loud here, but if the government operated a bank they could apply some common sense to the whole system:
* Allow any legal transaction (so if another payment processor refuses you, you have a backup)
* Allow an account for any legal entity (so no more debanking)
* By setting rates for savings and mortgages, it would provide a soft range for other banks to move within
* The state would only have to guarantee its own bank. If other banks crash and burn it won't take down civilisation
How does that fix censorship concerns? The main issue is that political pressure campaigns has a lever over the entire payment processing sector because of cartel like behaviour. A public service could provide an alternative for sure but it'd have to be done very carefully and independent.
Actual government stuff is way more legally constrained than private sector stuff. It would be trivially to sue for freedom of speech if I was gov.
Public-private partnerships like chartered banks, and outright cartels like Visa MasterCard, are much more fruitful mechanisms for this sort of civil liberties abuse.
What would the post office do with spam? Their existing business model is chiefly predicated on delivering junk mail.
I’m not sure how the federal government would deal with fraud on the payment side, either. The US does not have a strong system of identity.
Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors. And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the transaction.
> the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
Assuming this is a good idea, what is my email address going to look like?
Am I going to have to be xx_toast_xx@postalcustomer like at yahoo? or will it be my address ... if so, what about the other three adults who get mail at my address; do I have to change my email address when I move? Will it be my real name, but if so, what about the other hundred people with the same name as me? (Which isn't that bad, I know lots of people with a way larger highlander list) Will it just be my social security number and we can pretend duplicates don't exist?
What qualifies someone to be an everyone for this purpose?
What's the profit in that?
/s
You say /s, but a government issued and USPS operated e-mail service may be very profitable. In the Netherlands we have a government message system where the tax office, local counties, water companies, etc can send you 'official' messages. Thing is though, each message costs €0.25 to send. I think this is ridiculously expensive for a glorified email, but I suppose they have a lot of certifications and audits and the like. I hope, anyway.
Anyway, email itself is broken, but this system works because if it costs money to send a message, it discourages any spambot and/or misuse.
€0.25 is much less than the cost of printing and posting a letter, and presumably this service comes with proof of delivery.
(There's a similar system in Denmark.)
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