"We hope to close the access to the banking system that mass marketing fraudsters enjoy - effectively putting a choke hold on it…"

This concerted effort, later labeled "Operation Choke Point", targeted a wide range of business categories, including ammunition sales, drug paraphernalia, payday loans, dating services, pornography, telemarketing, tobacco sales, and government grants. This broad application of financial exclusion ultimately prompted multiple lawsuits and federal investigations into the conduct of both the DOJ and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as well as harsh criticism from all corners.

"The clandestine Operation Choke Point had more in common with a purge of ideological foes than a regulatory enforcement action", wrote Frank Keating, a former governor of Oklahoma who served in the DOJ during the Reagan administration, in a 2018 editorial for The Hill. "It targeted wide swaths of businesses with little regard for whether legal businesses were swept up and harmed. In fact, that seemed to be the goal."

In 2017, the Trump administration's DOJ wrote a letter to Congress indicating that Operation Choke Point was officially over. In 2018, the FDIC promised to limit its personnel's ability to "terminate account relationships" and to put "additional training" into place for its examiners.

But in the years since the federal government so blatantly demonstrated its interest in dictating access to banking services and its power to do so deliberately with little or no consequences, many feel that little has changed.