U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released a report on the Federal Reserve’s use of Interest on Reserve Balances (IORB).
The report found that in 2024, the Federal Reserve paid $187 billion in IORB payments, or 10.3% of the entire federal deficit.
In addition, the report says that IORB payments account for 12 percent of all profits for the 5 largest American banks from 2013-2024. Specifically, in 2024, IORB payments accounted for 16.5 percent of net interest income for the 5 largest US banks.
Also, the report states that from January 2013 through July 2025, 39 percent, or roughly $235 billion, of IORB payments were issued to foreign or majority foreign-owned banks.
It also notes that the Fed has been operating at an unprecedented loss since 2022, averaging $96 billion in losses in each of the last two years. Without the IORB, total remittances by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury would have totaled more than $1.5 trillion since 2008.
“This report marks the first step in finally Auditing the Fed, but there is still much more work left to do,” Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said. “My ‘End the Fed’s Big Bank Bailout Act’ would end the forcible transfer of wealth from average Americans to Wall Street institutions under the guise of IORB payments, while my ‘Federal Reserve Transparency Act’ would allow meaningful oversight of all functions of the Fed, which is long overdue. If the Fed handed over this data, what is hiding in the information they still refuse to provide?”
The report was released in advance of the committee’s upcoming hearing to examine these findings.
The report is based on over 40,000 pages of documents Paul obtained from the Federal Reserve detailing IORB payments for every two-week period from July 2013 through July 2025.