Top U.S. banks have “debanked” customers because of their political or religious views, as well as their business activities, according to a report from the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The report, released on Wednesday, examines a practice that President Trump has claimed discriminates against conservatives over their views. Debanking has also been highlighted by some cryptocurrency investors, who claim their accounts have been closed because banks are uncomfortable working with crypto industry clients.
The OCC said the report was in accordance with Mr. Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring federal banking regulators to review complaints to identify financial institutions that had declined business with clients because of their views.
Some conservatives have argued that they’ve been unfairly targeted by financial institutions, although the OCC found that some banks had also refused to do business with Democratic-leaning organizations. Debanking can also occur for legal and regulatory reasons, such as if a bank detects potentially fraudulent activity or an account is overdrawn.
The OCC, which reviewed 100,000 complaints and hundreds of bank decisions between 2020 and September 2025, found that the nine largest national banks it supervises had policies that swayed their decisions based on political, religious or business activities.
“Americans should have access to financial services regardless of their beliefs, affiliations or political views. Fair access to financial services is not a mantra — it is a mandate,” said Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould in a statement on Wednesday.
The incidents cited in the report include the payment processor WePay, which is now defunct and was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2017. WePay closed the accounts of several merchants selling MAGA- or Trump-related items, the OCC said.
“Our policies prohibit discrimination against customers based on political or religious views,” a JPMorgan spokesperson said. WePay’s processes “did not meet our expectations. We identified it, corrected it, and the business no longer operates.”
The OCC also found that some banks turned away customers due to their industries. For instance, businesses involved in oil and gas exploration, coal mining or firearms were restricted from some financial services, the agency concluded.
Other banks cited in the report, including Citibank and Wells Fargo, declined to comment and pointed to a statement from the Bank Policy Institute, a trade group for the banking industry.
“The banking industry supports fair access to banking services and has been working to ensure that government regulations and policies enable banks to serve law-abiding customers,” the Bank Policy Institute said in response to the OCC’s findings.
The group added, “We support efforts to establish clear and consistent standards that promote access while maintaining sound risk management, including the administration’s recent efforts to prioritize supervisory attention on material financial risk and rather than reputational risk.”

Endeavor Health, including its nine Chicago-area hospitals, announced Wednesday it plans to merge under the umbrella of Rush University System for Health, according to hospital officials.
For now, not much will change for patients as the proposed merger will undergo a regulatory process that could take months before it’s approved. If approved, the combined the health system would include 12 hospitals in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, which could make it one of the largest health systems in the area.
Endeavor Health hospitals include Swedish Hospital, Evanston Hospital, Edward Hospital, Skokie Hospital, Elmhurst Hospital, Glenbrook Hospital, Highland Park Hospital, Linden Oaks Hospital and Northwest Community Hospital. Under the proposed merger, the hospitals would continue to operate but with Rush branding.
Dr. Omar Lateef, president and CEO of the Rush University System for Health and Rush University Medical Center, said the goal is to improve access to patients and opportunities for its workforce. The proposed combined system would include its current hospitals — Rush University Medical Center, Rush Copley Medical Center and Rush Oak Park Hospital.
“If you need a clinical trial, this should open up clinical trials,” Lateef said. “If you need access to a higher level or a more local type of care, then you can get it where you are. The goal of this is to enhance access, to take the highest quality of care and expand it to all our sites and make any patient who is in that site seamlessly able to go to another site.”
If the merger closes, Lateef would take on a role as CEO emeritus and serve as a strategic adviser while J.P. Gallagher, the current leader of Endeavor Health, will become the president and CEO of the new combined health system, according to a news release.
The merger between two of the biggest hospital systems in the Chicago area would create a more than $10 billion giant and comes as Endeavor inches back from a financial loss, records show.
Endeavor had around $6.4 billion in 2025, but lost around $34 million that year, and lost nearly $500 million the year before mostly due to legal settlements, records show. So far this year, Endeavor looks to be turning those losses around.
Rush had around $4.4 billion in revenue in 2026. Both are nonprofits.
The proposed combined system is part of a larger trend of consolidation happening in hospital markets across the country, said Zachary Levinson, project director of KFF Project on Hospital Costs. KFF is a nonprofit health policy research, polling and news organization.
Mergers can help hospitals operate more efficiently and help those financially struggling keep their doors open, Levinson said. But it could also drive up the cost for patients.
“Mergers often reduce competition and that could allow hospitals to charge more for care,” Levinson said. “When you look at the research, there’s now a substantial body of evidence finding that consolidation has lead to higher prices without clear effects on quality.”
It’s likely consolidation among hospitals will continue in response to cuts to federal healthcare spending, Levinson said.
Gallagher said the economic pressures facing healthcare did not directly lead to the merger, but he did want to ensure the Endeavor institutions continued to serve its workforce and community for decades to come.
“This is kind of a long-term bet on being able to not just weather some of those pressures, but frankly, be strong and do some things differently that allow us to improve what that care and experience looks like even in light of the environment,” Gallagher said.
The merger will come with a $1 billion investment from Endeavor’s endowment that will fund community programs, innovation along with research and academics at the combined system, Gallagher and Lateef said.
“We know that right now there is a massive health care shortage of providers in this country,” Lateef said. “There are not enough nurses, there are not enough doctors, there are not enough ultrasound techs. We have a health science university and we are committed to increasing our existing workforce, and we’re going to take that money and help grow our existing programs.”
The investment will also be used toward research efforts delving into health equity and neuroscience, Lateef said. Other funds will be used for Rush programs that aim to reduce the life expectancy gap in Chicago.
Bringing together different workplace cultures is one of the biggest risks in mergers, said Lynne Barnes, a clinical professor and program director for the master of health administration at the University of Illinois. But Barnes said she sees an exciting opportunity to bridge the academic side of Rush’s work with the services provided at Endeavor facilities.
“The challenges for the leaders will be a fun one — to knit those two systems together and bring out the best of each of them in the other,” Barnes said. “There’s a lot of opportunity in that merger.”
Mergers are bound to bring changes, and Barnes said it’s important for leaders to make employees feel included in well-planned, communicated changes. Otherwise, leaders risk employees becoming frustrated, she said.
The announcement comes as nurses at Rush and Endeavor in recent months have separately gone public with their efforts to unionize their workplaces, many citing concerns about nurse-to-patient ratios. Just this week, nurses at Edward Hospital in Naperville announced they had filed a petition to hold an election, a step toward unionizing under the umbrella of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Nurses at Rush University Medical Center voted earlier this year to form a union under the same umbrella, which is an affiliate of the larger National Nurses United.
In a statement, Brenda Langford, a Stroger Hospital nurse and member of the National Nurses Organizing Committee board of directors, said nurses worry that mergers result in cuts to hospital services and drive up the cost of healthcare.
“Nurses call on state and federal regulators to block any merger that fails to guarantee all services are protected and nurses demand that we have a voice in the future of any merged health system. We know what happens when the state fails to act,” Langford said in the statement, adding that other recent hospital consolidations has lead to cuts to certain medical services.
Nurses at Endeavor hospitals in Evanston, Skokie, Glenbrook and Highland Park have also been organizing under a different union, Teamsters Local 743. In a statement, the union said the proposed merger highlights why nurses need representation.
“During mergers and other workplace changes, workers must have protection and a voice in decisions that affect them because they are the ones who make these health systems successful,” the Teamsters said in the statement.
Lateef said the merger will provide more opportunities for nurses.
“Nurses at Endeavor are vital to our mission; they’re vital to our identity and a critical part of everything that we do,” Gallagher said. “We have been very actively engaged, listening and meeting with our nurses and understanding what’s important to them. And we’ve made very significant investments and we’ll continue to do that as a part of our future both near term and long term.”

Among the roughly 1,000 Netflix staffers laid off on Wednesday were TV executives Lisa Lang McMullen, James Oh, Carolina Garcia and Andrew McQuinn.
McMullen was most recently director of overall deals and series at Netflix, Oh was director of drama series, Garcia and McQuinn both held the title of director of original series.
Also laid off were Jason Pan, manager of original series, Aaron Davidson, manager of adult animation comedy, and Dan Evans, manager of original animation.
The Netflix cuts impacted about 6 percent of employees, mostly from its product, tech, legal and HR teams. It is the streamer’s largest layoff since 2022. The movie division was also impacted in the reorg, with film vp Doug Belgrad and exec Sheroum Kim exiting.
Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters announced the staff reduction via email this morning.
“Our mission — to entertain the world — is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources,” the co-CEOs wrote in the memo, which was obtained by THR. “Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full-year forecast. We’ll continue to invest aggressively in high-impact areas to improve our service and further drive growth and innovation. Doing that means making focused choices across the business so we can keep delivering for our members, partners, employees, and investors.”
“We know changes like this are tough, but let’s stay focused. This is one of the most dynamic times in the history of entertainment — and it’s a moment perfectly suited to a company like ours that’s built at the intersection of technology and entertainment,” Sarandos and Peters continued. “Now it’s on us to step up and meet the moment, together, like we always do.”
Netflix will reveal its third quarter earnings next week.
At Bloomberg’s recent Screentime event, Sarandos acknowledged that Netflix is “not growing as fast as I want us to.” The streaming leader’s engagement is especially not up to snuff — Netflix hopes recent hits like Below and East of Eden can boost its usage time.

Dell shares plummeted 11% on Wednesday and dragged down other data center equipment names on mounting concerns that enterprise spending on artificial intelligence won’t justify the AI buildout.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise , Oracle and Super Micro all joined in the downward slide.
In a report to clients on Wednesday, analysts at Barclays downgraded its rating on Dell, HPE and NetApp , “after a significant run and on enterprise AI timing.”
Makers of data center servers and other backend equipment have been favored on Wall Street this year on optimism that they’ll be selling huge volumes of gear tied to demand for AI chips and systems for years into the future. Dell has been one of the top performers on the market, up more than 300% this year, while HPE has jumped about 160% and NetApp has doubled.
However, sentiment toward the AI infrastructure space has shifted of late due in part to concerning revenue figures out of OpenAI and more broadly out of fear that rising interest rates will create a challenging environment as so much of the buildout is reliant on debt. Oracle, a heavy borrower, dropped 9% on Wednesday and is now down 33% for the year while neocloud CoreWeave plunged 15%, wiping out its gains for 2026.
The Barclays analysts said they haven’t seen a “meaningful AI inflection” when it comes to enterprise spending for Dell, HPE and NetApp, lowering the rating on each to the equivalent of a hold from buy. They instead attribute increased revenue to the global memory shortage and noted that infrastructure companies have passed the higher price of memory along to customers.
“There is growing sentiment about enterprise AI adoption creating a hardware refresh,” the Barclays analysts wrote, adding that businesses are typically allocating just 5% of their IT budgets to AI. “We believe the strong enterprise revenues are more of a function of memory costs than a move to enterprise AI at this time.”
The Barclays analysts also found that only about a quarter of total enterprise AI spend is going towards hardware. They said normalizing and eventually declining memory prices could weigh on infrastructure-related revenue.
Memory is a notoriously cyclical business, and stocks were hit this week after China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, reported progress over the weekend on a new chip structure. Micron is down 11% for the week, while South Korea’s SK Hynix has tumbled 13% in U.S. trading and Western Digital has dropped more than 8%.

Bank of America has hired an army of external contractors to help it patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced artificial intelligence models including Anthropic’s Mythos, the bank’s CEO, Brian Moynihan, told CNBC on Wednesday.
In an interview after the bank’s third-quarter earnings release, Moynihan said that earlier this year the company rushed to bolster a wide spectrum of its internal and vendor code using thousands of employees and outside personnel.
“That risk is real risk, and that’s why when the frontier-type models came out. … A lot of us sat down and said, ‘How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?” Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker.
“We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area,” he said.
The bank spent a “couple hundred million plus” on the software remediation and regulatory issues related to anti-money laundering compliance in the third quarter, Moynihan told analysts earlier Wednesday.
The comments are some of the first by a major U.S. corporation to specify the manpower and dollars spent to protect software systems from Mythos, which was released to a small group of banks, technology firms and government agencies in April.
They also highlight the dual-edged nature of AI: While it can help companies save money by boosting productivity, the ability of models like Mythos to uncover and exploit decades-old software flaws has also forced firms into a costly defensive scramble.
“We’ve got to stay ahead of them, and we’ve got to be mindful that the people doing the software development are the people trying to sell us the services,” Moynihan said.
Still, Moynihan — speaking as his company’s shares slumped as much as 8% Wednesday — sought to reassure investors that the spending increase was temporary.
“Once you patch, you don’t have to patch as much. … The pipeline moves through,” Moynihan said, adding that the bank expects remediation costs to decline over time.
In other places, AI is helping to reduce expenses. Bank of America has about 130 internal AI projects, and savings from those efforts are expected to rise from $300 million this year to $700 million in 2027, Moynihan told analysts.
Bank of America’s head count fell by about 3,400 employees in the past year as the firm cut roughly 5% of managers, he said. It’s unclear how much of that workforce reduction is attributable to AI.