Senators Push Mined in America Act for Bitcoin

The Mined in America Act landed in the US Senate on Monday, backed by Senators Bill Cassidy and Cynthia Lummis — a bill that frames Bitcoin mining as a national security issue and, if passed, would reshape where mining hardware gets built and who controls it. The timing isn't accidental. Washington's appetite for crypto-friendly legislation has never been sharper, and this one is going after a vulnerability that Bitcoin advocates have been quietly worried about for years.

What Does the Mined in America Act Actually Do?

The bill creates a voluntary 'Mined in America' certification for crypto mining facilities and mining pools operating in the United States. Certified operators would be required to phase out hardware manufactured by companies with ties to 'foreign adversaries' — a category that, given the geopolitical context, is aimed squarely at Chinese manufacturers. Facilities that earn the certification would also be expected to support domestic manufacturing of mining equipment.

Beyond the certification framework, the legislation directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to assist US manufacturers in building more secure, energy-efficient mining hardware. That's not a small ask — American-made ASIC chips have never seriously challenged Bitmain or MicroBT on price or performance — but the bill sets the institutional scaffolding for that competition to eventually develop.

The bill was introduced under the Mined in America Act by Republican senators Cassidy of Louisiana and Lummis of Wyoming, two of the more Bitcoin-forward voices in the chamber.

Digital asset mining is a big part of our economy. We should be doing it here in America.

The Hardware Problem Nobody Wanted to Talk About

Here's the uncomfortable math. The US hosts roughly 38% of the Bitcoin network's hashrate — more than double Russia, which sits in second place. By that metric, America dominates global Bitcoin mining. But 97% of the machines doing that mining were manufactured by two Chinese companies: Bitmain and MicroBT. That's an extraordinary supply chain exposure for something that proponents routinely describe as critical financial infrastructure.

Dennis Porter, CEO of the Satoshi Action Fund and a vocal supporter of the legislation, put it bluntly. The bill, he argued, 'breaks that dependency by building a virtuous cycle of domestic manufacturing, certified mining operations, grid-strengthening energy infrastructure and a pipeline to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.' That's a lot of outcomes for one piece of legislation — but the core diagnosis is correct.

The vulnerability isn't theoretical either. In late 2024, US Customs and Border Protection paused shipments of thousands of Bitmain ASIC machines at US ports for several months. Mining company Luxor Technology was among the firms impacted. By March 2025, Luxor's COO Ethan Vera explained the machines had been seized because they were mistakenly believed to be illegally imported radio frequency devices. Mistakenly — but the disruption was real, and it illustrated exactly how a single chokepoint in the supply chain can freeze a significant chunk of American mining capacity overnight.

The Mined in America Act breaks that dependency by building a virtuous cycle of domestic manufacturing, certified mining operations, grid-strengthening energy infrastructure and a pipeline to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Codifying Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve

The bill's second major component is arguably more consequential in the near term: it would codify President Trump's executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve into statutory law. Right now, the reserve exists by executive order — meaning a future administration could unwind it with a stroke of a pen. Baking it into legislation changes the math considerably.

Lummis has been pushing for a statutory Bitcoin reserve for over a year, so this isn't new territory for her. But pairing the reserve codification with the domestic mining push is a smart political move. It bundles two things the Bitcoin-aligned policy community wants into one bill, and it frames both through the lens of national security rather than crypto enthusiasm. That framing tends to get further in Congress.

Whether the bill advances past committee is an open question. The Senate's legislative calendar is crowded, and crypto-specific bills have a long history of stalling despite bipartisan interest. But the fact that two sitting Republican senators introduced it during an active legislative session — not just floated it as a press release — suggests this one has at least some institutional backing.

Why This Matters for the Bitcoin Mining Industry

China's 2021 mining ban handed the US its dominant hashrate position almost overnight. Miners fled, hardware followed, and America absorbed a huge share of the network's computing power in a matter of months. That was a lucky break, not a policy win — and the Mined in America Act is, in part, an attempt to turn that windfall into something more durable.

If the certification program gains traction, it creates a meaningful market incentive for miners to source American-made equipment — or at least equipment not tied to foreign adversary manufacturers. That demand signal, even from a voluntary program, could help justify the capital investment needed to build domestic ASIC manufacturing at scale. The US has the fab capacity, in theory. What it has lacked is the market demand to make it pencil out.

For miners holding bags of Bitmain S21s and MicroBT Whatsminers — which is essentially every large-scale operation in the country right now — the phase-out language probably feels distant. Voluntary certification programs don't force anyone to do anything. But the regulatory direction of travel is increasingly clear: Washington wants to see the supply chain move, and this bill is the latest signal that it's willing to legislate to make that happen.