The U.S. Marshals Service awarded Coinbase an $8.1 million, no-bid contract last month to manage forfeited cryptocurrency, according to a federal contracting document released this week.
Federal government contractors are generally not allowed to donate to political committees. But Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, is one of the nation’s most prolific corporate political donors.
Coinbase received a $30 million-plus contract in 2024 to manage seized cryptocurrency assets for the Marshals Service, the federal law enforcement agency that handles asset forfeiture. The Marshals Service moved quickly this fall to give Coinbase the new federal contract following a major scandal involving another contractor, Command Services and Support Inc., which had also received a crypto management contract in 2024.
In January 2026, the Marshals Service discovered that the son of the company president had stolen at least $46 million from wallets managed by the agency, according to a redacted justification document written by the agency and signed affidavit by an FBI special agent.
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“The USMS is now facing an emergent and urgent situation that requires an immediate solution in order to avoid further possible loss of seized cryptocurrency,” the agency wrote in a redacted justification document arguing Coinbase is the only suitable company to take over the contract.
The value of the digital assets Coinbase would manage under the contract is redacted, but the document describes the inventory as “sizable.”
Marshals Service spokesperson Abigail Meyer declined to comment beyond the information in the contract. Meyer also said The Washington Sun must file a Freedom of Information Act request for the inventory balance.
Coinbase did not respond to requests for comment.In recent years, Coinbase has spent massive amounts of money on federal elections.
During the 2024 election cycle, Coinbase gave more than $79 million to federal political committees, including the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake, according to campaign finance data analyzed by OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks the flow of money in American politics.
Coinbase has continued to spend tens of millions of dollars during the 2026 election cycle, including more than $52.5 million in contributions to Fairshake, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Left-leaning nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen argues that Coinbase is breaking the law with its contributions.
After Coinbase received the first Marshal Service contract in 2024, Public Citizen filed a complaint with the FEC accusing Coinbase of violating a ban on political contributions by federal contractors.
A few days out from the 2026 general election, the FEC has still not ruled on whether Coinbase is violating the ban.
Two factors contribute to the delay.
First, under the best of circumstances, it can take months or even years for the FEC to investigate complaints.
Second, since May 2025, the FEC has not had enough commissioners to carry out any of its high-level duties — including investigations and enforcement actions — because the Senate has yet to vote on a pair of commissioner candidates President Donald Trump nominated in February, months after the agency dipped below its quorum of four commissioners.
The FEC’s enforcement backlog has ballooned to more than 300 cases, FEC Chair Shana Broussard wrote on Bluesky last month.
In response to questions about the status of the Public Citizen complaint, Myles Martin, a spokesperson for the FEC, told The Sun there were no closed cases involving Coinbase in the agency’s enforcement database.
Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen, and Molly White, an independent researcher who filed the complaint with Public Citizen, said they’ve heard no update from the FEC on the status of their complaint against Coinbase.
“The fact that Coinbase has spent another, you know, $60-plus million since the complaint was received by the FEC certainly suggests that they’re not in any hurry to stop the spending,” White told The Sun.
The company has previously denied it’s in violation of the federal contractor contribution ban.
“Whether intentional or not, this is misinformation,” Paul Grewal, then-chief legal officer at Coinbase, wrote in a post on X in 2024, arguing Coinbase was not a contractor “under the plain language” of the law.
Federal law defines a government contractor as anyone who enters into a contract paid “in whole or in part from funds appropriated by the Congress.” Since the contract is funded by the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, rather than traditional, annual congressional appropriations, the ban does not apply, Grewal argued.
Meyer, the Marshals Service spokesperson, confirmed the contract was funded by the forfeiture fund.
White and Public Citizen pushed back in a supplemental memo to the FEC that summer, arguing the law does not specify traditional, annual appropriation funding and that Congress itself established the Asset Forfeiture Fund.
“If their interpretation is accurate, then there’s a huge loophole in these laws where … basically anyone could argue that they’re not a federal contractor,” White told The Sun. “I think that it’s just not an accurate interpretation, and they pretty clearly are a federal contractor.”
Eric Petry, counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program, told The Sun that this “really technical difference” in the legal wording, which he interprets as “only applies to contractors who are paid from funds appropriated by Congress,” is just one more example of why Congress should expand the scope of its federal contractor contribution ban.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) told The Sun this week that they plan to introduce a bill aimed at another major political donor, Elon Musk, whose companies receive billions in government contracts. The bill would extend the federal contribution ban to include executive officeholders, shareholders and affiliated corporations of government contractors.
Petry called it “tremendously exciting” to see the legislation introduced and a “step in the right direction.”
But he expressed frustration that the FEC has been unable to address a complaint made during the 2024 election cycle before Election Day 2026.
“It’s bad enough when the laws are weak or there are loopholes in the law, but it’s almost worse when you have laws on the books that aren’t being enforced because the regulator is inadequate, and that’s the situation where we’re finding ourselves now,” Petry said.
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