Americans who want to transfer money online have options. They can go with services like Venmo and PayPal, make transfers from their personal bank, or do a transaction with stablecoins issued by cryptocurrency companies.

All those options have something in common that may not always occur to consumers: The transfers are offered by exclusively by private companies. That means users’ accounts aren’t stuffed with physical dollars, but rather with promises made by private companies to make the recipient whole.

Unlike with cash money, the system creates a middleman for every dollar spent — and an opportunity for them to make a profit off the digital equivalent of something so simple as handing someone else a bill.

There’s no way to send money digitally without involving a company that has an angle. With cash on the way out — the last penny was just minted, for instance — there is a possible future where every single monetary transaction between people involves private interests.

The little-noted distinction raises a question: Why can’t the actual backer of the dollar — the U.S. government — create a way to send money itself? Academics have been exploring this question for years, asking why the federal government can’t back its own digital currency to facilitate transfers between people.

A system with a central bank digital currency, as it’s known, could operate as a public good, advocates say, with potentially zero or minimal transaction fees — just by letting the government take a small step from backing physical currency to backing its digital equivalent.

In the U.S., those researchers never got past an exploratory phase, but that did not stop a central bank digital currency from becoming a boogeyman for right-wing activists.

The Republican House majority whip, Rep. Tom Emmer, warned that the Chinese Communist Party uses a digital currency to spy on its citizens. Online memes dubbed them a “mark of the beast.” Donald Trump promised to ban them last year, and followed through with an executive order in January.

Now, Republicans are trying to make sure that no matter who is president, private companies will forever hold the monopoly on Americans sending money to each other online.

The bill would even prevent research on government-issued digital currencies.

They’re pushing a formal, codified ban that would squash government competition to private payments before it ever gets started. The House included a central bank digital currency ban in its version of a defense budget bill, which will be........

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