As reported on November 11, 2026, former White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said President Donald Trump still intends to buy bitcoin for the U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, while open-market purchases face serious legal problems. The account comes from Bitcoin.com News, as carried by TechFlowPost. It is not a new purchase announcement.
Witt’s comments
On the What Bitcoin Did podcast, Witt said the president is interested and that there has been a great deal of related discussion. The November 11, 2026 report does not give the podcast’s air date, and it does not quote any order to buy bitcoin on the open market.
The March 2025 reserve
An executive order in March 2025 created the reserve by pooling bitcoin the government had already seized. It directed the Treasury and Commerce departments to look for “budget-neutral” acquisition strategies. As of that report, no such strategy had been made public, and no open-market purchase had been announced.
Spending authority and the NDAA
Witt said direct open-market buying is of “questionable legality” because Congress controls federal spending. He also said concern about purchases prompted Congress to add language to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) providing that this must not be done. He added that efforts were underway to obtain permission and authorization. The report does not quote the statute or name a bill number beyond the NDAA.
Whether the reserve can be made permanent
Witt said locking the reserve in permanently is harder. Passing a standalone bill through a divided Congress would be extremely difficult. Without legislation, the reserve would rest on the executive order, and a future president could revoke it.
Conditional reading
Any link from this report to future official bitcoin demand is conditional, and it is Witt’s assessment rather than a confirmed plan. The mechanism he describes is legal authority: seized coins are already in the reserve, while additional open-market buying would need a path that survives Congress’s control of spending. That path is not established in the report. The case for added demand weakens if no budget-neutral strategy is published, if the NDAA restriction remains, if authorization efforts fail, or if a later president withdraws the order. Nothing here is a price forecast or a trade instruction.
This brief restates the November 11, 2026 TechFlowPost item and separates it from the March 2025 executive order. It does not treat either as a development occurring at the time of this rewrite, and it adds no facts after the source report.
TechFlowPost, November 11, 2026, 17:35 UTC+8, citing Bitcoin.com News
