President Trump's executive order directing the Justice Department to expedite marijuana's move from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act has prompted a rare bipartisan conversation on Capitol Hill - one that is, for now, generating more questions than action. Senators from both parties are watching the administrative process with cautious eyes, particularly as it relates to whether federal rescheduling might finally crack open the long-stalled push to give cannabis businesses access to mainstream banking services. The problem is that nobody seems to be in a hurry.
Booker Sees an Opening - And a Reason for Skepticism
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) put it plainly this week: "It's too early to tell." That isn't fence-sitting so much as realistic appraisal. The DOJ has issued no timeline since Trump signed the order last month, and Attorney General Pam Bondi - who has spent much of her career opposing marijuana legalization - was conspicuously absent from the signing ceremony. For an administration that has been inconsistent in its messaging on cannabis, that absence registered.
Booker's concern is structural. Even if rescheduling moves forward, it is an executive action - reversible by a future administration, subject to agency discretion, and currently crawling through a process the Drug Enforcement Administration has described as still "pending" despite the White House directive. A recent Congressional Research Service report noted that DOJ could, in theory, reject the president's order outright or restart the scientific review from scratch, effectively running out the clock. That is not a hypothetical. It is a documented procedural option.
What Booker is holding onto is the possibility that administrative momentum creates political space for Congress to act on the SAFER Banking Act - the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation Banking Act - which would extend federal safe harbor protections to banks and credit unions that choose to work with state-licensed cannabis businesses. Those businesses currently operate in a legal gray zone where they are often locked out of basic financial services, forced to run cash-heavy operations that create real security and compliance risks.
SAFER Banking Has Moved - Slowly, and Not Yet Reintroduced
The SAFER Banking Act has been circling Congress for years. Its predecessor legislation passed the House multiple times over the better part of a decade before consistently dying in the Senate. The most recent version cleared the Senate Banking Committee in 2023 but never reached a full floor vote. As of now, a new version has not been formally reintroduced in the 119th Congress - more than a year in.
Booker, who previously threatened to block the bill over equity concerns, says he's since secured language that meaningfully extends protections to Community Development Financial Institutions and Minority Depository Institutions - institutions that disproportionately serve minority-owned businesses, including cannabis operators who were often on the front lines of enforcement during the decades the federal government spent treating marijuana as a controlled substance equivalent to heroin. That addition matters; without it, banking reform risked becoming a windfall primarily for large, well-capitalized multi-state operators.
But here's the catch: none of that matters if the bill doesn't move. And right now, the senator expected to sponsor SAFER in this session - Republican Bernie Moreno of Ohio - is not treating it as urgent. He told reporters this week that marijuana banking sits low on his list, behind government funding, healthcare legislation, and crypto market structure reform. Asked whether rescheduling reduces pressure on Congress to act, Moreno answered, "I think so, probably." That is not the language of someone drafting bill text.
The Rescheduling Mechanism and Its Limits
Moving cannabis to Schedule III would not legalize it federally. It would, however, remove marijuana from the most restrictive drug category - one it shares with substances considered to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse - and place it alongside drugs like ketamine and certain anabolic steroids, which have recognized therapeutic applications and lower abuse classifications. That shift would have real downstream effects: it would, for instance, relieve cannabis companies of the punishing tax burdens imposed by Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which currently bars businesses trafficking in Schedule I or II substances from deducting ordinary business expenses.
What rescheduling would not do is resolve the banking problem. Financial institutions operating under federal charter remain subject to federal law, and Schedule III status does not create the affirmative legal protection that SAFER Banking is designed to provide. Banks would still face regulatory risk in servicing cannabis clients without explicit legislative cover. The two tracks - administrative rescheduling and congressional banking reform - are related but not interchangeable. Treating one as a substitute for the other is a misreading of how federal drug and banking law actually interact.
Meanwhile, two Republican senators moved last week to block the rescheduling process entirely via a floor amendment - it wasn't taken up, but its introduction signals that opposition within the GOP caucus remains real. For an administration that has struggled to project coherent drug policy, that internal friction is not trivial.
What Comes Next, and Why the Calendar Matters
The honest read here is that rescheduling and banking reform are both moving through institutions that are, by design, slow - and both face genuine procedural and political obstacles that enthusiasm alone cannot clear. The DEA's pending appeal process, DOJ's silence on timelines, and Congress's packed legislative calendar all pull in the same direction: delay.
For cannabis businesses, particularly smaller and minority-owned operations that depend on CDFIs for access to capital, that delay is not abstract. Operating without reliable banking access means managing payroll in cash, paying vendors outside conventional wire systems, and absorbing insurance and security costs that cut into already-tight margins. Every month the legislative calendar defers SAFER Banking is a month that structural disadvantage persists.
Booker's instinct - to use the administrative move as an entry point for durable legislative change, rather than treat it as a resolution in itself - is the right one. Executive orders expire or get reversed; statutes are harder to undo. But passing a statute requires a sponsor willing to push, a leadership team willing to schedule floor time, and a Senate majority willing to vote. None of those conditions are visibly in place right now. That's not cynicism. That's just the count as it stands.
