Starting now, anyone wiring money out of the country through a money service business has to check a box confirming whether they're on public assistance. If they are, the wire doesn't go through.
That's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's new rule, announced November 12. And it targets something every American taxpayer has quietly seethed about for years.
The setup was simple and infuriating. An estimated $200 billion leaches out of the U.S. economy annually through remittances — cash wired abroad by people living in the United States. Some portion of that money originates from government welfare programs funded by American tax dollars. Bessent decided that pipeline needed a shutoff valve.
"If you are wiring the money out of the country, one of two things must be true," Bessent said. "From now on, anyone who wires money out from one of these money service businesses has to check a box saying whether they are on public assistance. And if you are on public assistance, we are going to start pushing that you cannot wire money out of the country."
The mechanism is straightforward. Money service businesses — the storefronts where remittances get processed — now carry a compliance obligation. Check the box. Are you receiving government benefits? Yes or no. Yes means the transaction stops.
Bessent didn't limit the announcement to remittances. He signaled the IRS is conducting audits on banks suspected of facilitating money laundering, with particular attention on funds flowing from Minnesota's Somali community to Somalia — where the concern is that dollars end up in the hands of al-Shabaab, the Muslim terror group that has operated as an ongoing security threat in East Africa.
"Treasury will deploy all tools to bring an end to this egregious unchecked fraud and hold perpetrators to account," Bessent said. He followed that with a broader warning: "I am here this week to signal the U.S. Treasury's unwavering commitment to recovering stolen funds, prosecuting fraudulent criminals, preventing scandals like this from ever happening again, and investigating similar schemes state by state."
State by state. That's the phrase that should make a few governors nervous.
The objection practically writes itself — that this targets immigrants unfairly, that remittances are a lifeline for families abroad. Except the rule doesn't touch anyone sending their own earned money home. It touches people spending taxpayer-funded benefits and then wiring cash overseas. Those are two different populations, and conflating them is exactly how the loophole survived this long.
For years, this arrangement operated in plain sight. American taxpayers funded welfare programs. Recipients collected benefits. A portion of those benefits walked into a wire transfer office and left the country. The money landed in foreign bank accounts, foreign economies, and in some cases, according to Bessent's own framing, foreign terror networks. The cycle repeated every month.
The policy class in Washington treated this like weather — something that just happened, something nobody could do anything about. Two hundred billion dollars a year flowed out. The IRS looked the other way. Treasury shrugged.
Bessent checked a different box.
As reported by Breitbart, the new rule pairs the remittance crackdown with active fraud investigations already underway. The IRS audits on suspected money laundering banks are not future plans. They're happening now.
Two hundred billion dollars a year. A checkbox on a wire transfer form. Somehow nobody in Washington thought of it until now.