The Thirteen-Year Fight to Let Weed Money Into a Bank: A Complete History of the SAFE and SAFER Banking Acts

Every legal industry in America takes one thing for granted: the ability to walk into a bank and open an account. Cannabis does not. Thirteen years after the first federal bill was written to change that, dispensaries still pay their taxes in duffel bags of cash, landlords still get dropped by their banks for leasing to state-legal tenants, and credit card networks still refuse to process a $40 eighth. The SAFER Banking Act, which has passed the House seven times and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in 2023 but has never received a full Senate floor vote, represents Congress's longest-running unforced error in federal drug policy. This is how we got here.

2013: A Colorado Democrat writes a very short bill

In July 2013 — seven months after Colorado voters became the first in the country to legalize adult-use marijuana — Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) introduced the Marijuana Businesses Access to Banking Act alongside Washington's Rep. Denny Heck. The bill was narrow by design: it did not legalize cannabis, did not touch scheduling, and did not change the Controlled Substances Act. It simply prohibited federal banking regulators from penalizing a bank or credit union for serving a state-legal cannabis business.

It went nowhere. But Perlmutter would reintroduce some version of it in every Congress for the next decade, eventually rebranding it the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act. It became the most persistently reintroduced cannabis bill in American history.

2014: FinCEN tries to paper over the problem

While Congress stalled, the Obama administration tried to create workable rules administratively. On August 29, 2013, Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued what became known as the Cole Memo, instructing federal prosecutors to deprioritize enforcement against state-compliant cannabis operators. On February 14, 2014, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) followed with guidance — FIN-2014-G001 — telling banks they could serve cannabis businesses if they filed one of three specialized Suspicious Activity Reports: "marijuana limited," "marijuana priority," or "marijuana termination."

The guidance was a half-measure. It imposed heavy compliance costs on any bank willing to participate, offered no actual legal protection from federal prosecution, and was explicitly built on top of the Cole Memo — which Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded in January 2018. FinCEN kept its guidance in place anyway, creating the legally incoherent status quo that still governs cannabis banking today: banks follow rules built on a memo that no longer exists.

2019–2022: Seven House passages, zero Senate votes

The SAFE Banking Act finally broke through in the 116th Congress. On September 25, 2019, the House passed H.R. 1595 on a 321–103 vote, with 91 Republicans joining every Democrat. It was the first time either chamber of Congress had passed a standalone cannabis reform bill in American history.

Then the Senate did nothing.

That pattern repeated, with variations, seven times:

• May 2020 — SAFE language attached to the HEROES Act COVID relief package. Stripped in the Senate.
• October 2020 — House passed another COVID relief bill with SAFE attached. Died in the Senate.
• April 19, 2021 — H.R. 1996 passed the House 321–101 as a standalone bill. The Senate, now under Democratic control with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, still did not move it.
• September 21, 2021 — House added SAFE to the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act. Senate negotiators stripped it from the final bill.
• February 3, 2022 — House added SAFE to the America COMPETES Act. Stripped in conference.
• July 14, 2022 — House attached SAFE to the FY2023 NDAA. Stripped again.

The sticking point was not Republican opposition in the abstract — plenty of Republicans voted yes — but Senate procedure and Democratic priorities. Senate Majority Leader Schumer insisted on packaging SAFE with broader cannabis reform, including expungement provisions from the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act. Republicans who supported banking reform refused to vote for the broader package. And the filibuster meant any standalone bill needed 60 votes to clear cloture, a threshold banking reform has never demonstrably cleared.

Perlmutter retired at the end of the 117th Congress in January 2023 without seeing his bill signed into law. In a 2024 interview with Marijuana Moment, he called the Senate's inaction "one of the most frustrating experiences of my career."

2023: The rebrand, and the first real Senate vote

In April 2023, new House sponsors Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) reintroduced the bill in the 118th Congress. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) carried the Senate version. Then, in September, Schumer and Merkley unveiled a negotiated rewrite: the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation Banking Act — SAFER — introduced as S. 2860 with 36 cosponsors.

The rebrand was not cosmetic. The key addition was a rewritten Section 10, a provision addressing "discriminatory lending" that had become a proxy fight over Operation Choke Point — the Obama-era program Republicans accused of pressuring banks to drop politically disfavored industries like firearms dealers. Democrats worried the Republican-favored Section 10 language would handcuff bank regulators more broadly. After months of negotiation, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), then Senate Banking Committee chair, produced compromise language that survived scrutiny from both sides.

On September 27, 2023, the Senate Banking Committee voted 14–9 to advance the SAFER Banking Act. It was the first time any cannabis bill had ever cleared a Senate committee. The three Republican yes votes came from Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Daines, and Kevin Cramer (R-ND).

2024: Close, but the floor never materializes

Schumer repeatedly promised a Senate floor vote "soon" throughout 2024. It never came. By spring, his public position had shifted to needing "more Republican support" before bringing the bill up — an acknowledgment that the 60-vote cloture threshold remained out of reach. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) whipped against the bill, arguing it amounted to federal endorsement of state-level legalization. When the 118th Congress adjourned in January 2025, SAFER died on the Senate calendar with no floor action.

2025: Rescheduling steals the oxygen

The first year of President Trump's second term scrambled the politics. The DEA's rescheduling proceeding — moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III — had stalled after an administrative law judge recused himself in January 2025. In December 2025, Trump short-circuited the process with an executive order directing the Attorney General to reclassify marijuana administratively, a move that remains the subject of ongoing litigation.

For banking reform, the effect was paradoxical. Schedule III cannabis would still be federally controlled, and banks would still face money-laundering exposure without a statutory safe harbor. But advocates worried the rescheduling headlines would convince senators that the banking problem had been "solved" — exactly the misread that killed momentum in 2024.

2026: A new Congress, no new bill

As of this writing, no version of the SAFER Banking Act has been reintroduced in the 119th Congress. The most recent bill — S. 2860 from the 118th Congress — died on the Senate calendar in January 2025 without ever receiving a floor vote. The reintroduction streak — carried first by Perlmutter and then by Joyce and Blumenauer after his retirement — is paused for the first time since 2013.

Two dynamics explain the quiet.

The first is rescheduling. With Trump's December 2025 executive order directing the Attorney General to move marijuana to Schedule III administratively — and with that process now the focus of every cannabis lobbying dollar in Washington — banking reform has slipped down the priority list. Industry advocates worry that rescheduling headlines will convince senators the banking problem has been "solved," repeating the misread that killed momentum in 2024. It won't be. Schedule III cannabis would still be federally controlled, and banks would still face money-laundering exposure without a statutory safe harbor.

The second is Senate math. The September 2023 committee vote was a genuine breakthrough, but it did not change the 60-vote cloture threshold that banking reform has never demonstrably cleared. Majority Leader Schumer spent all of 2024 unable to find the votes; there is no public signal that the current Senate leadership has found them either. In mid-2025, a coalition of state attorneys general was still urging Congress to bring the existing bill to a floor vote — not to pass a new one.

Whether SAFER returns in this Congress will depend less on the cannabis industry than on whether Senate leadership sees a 60-vote path on a standalone cannabis bill. Neither party has demonstrated that count yet.

What's actually at stake

The practical problem the bill solves has not changed in thirteen years. The National Cannabis Industry Association estimates more than 70% of cannabis businesses still lack access to basic banking services. The resulting cash economy has produced a measurable human cost: Washington State alone recorded 67 armed dispensary robberies in the first quarter of 2022, roughly double the prior year's pace. A budtender was shot and killed in Tacoma. Thirty-two state attorneys general — Republican and Democratic — signed a 2023 letter urging Congress to pass the bill on public-safety grounds alone.

The industry cost is harder to quantify but substantial. Dispensaries pay premium rates for specialized cash-handling services. Multi-state operators cannot get conventional commercial loans and rely instead on sale-leaseback arrangements at punishing cap rates. Consumers pay cash for products sold legally in 42 states, in an economy where cash has otherwise become vestigial.

The through-line

What makes the SAFE/SAFER story unusual is not that it has failed — most cannabis bills fail — but that it has failed while commanding overwhelming bipartisan majorities at every stage. Seven House passages. A 14–9 Senate committee vote. Thirty-two state attorneys general on record. Polling showing 57-point margins of public support. The bill has never lost a vote it was actually allowed to take.

It has simply, repeatedly, not been allowed to take the final one. Whether a future Congress changes that will depend less on the cannabis industry than on whether Senate leadership brings a standalone cannabis bill to the floor and whether ten Republicans will vote for cloture on it. Neither has happened yet. Both have been "close" for more than a decade.