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By KEN SWEET (AP Business Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — Customers of Venmo, PayPal and CashApp should not store their money with those apps for the long term because the funds might not be safe during a crisis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned Thursday.

The alert comes several weeks after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, which all experienced bank runs after fearful customers with uninsured deposits pulled their money en masse.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures bank accounts up to $250,000. But money stored in Venmo or CashApp or Apple Cash is not being held in a traditional bank account. So, if there is an event similar to a bank run with those payment apps, those funds may not be protected.

Some of the funds may be eligible for pass-through insurance coverage if customers do certain activities with the apps, the CFPB said, but generally by default the apps are not covered by deposit insurance. For example, if a customer opened a PayPal Savings account, it would have deposit insurance through PayPal’s partner bank, Synchrony Bank. But the general PayPal account is not covered by insurance. For Apple Cash, which can be insured through Green Dot Bank, it requires a user to verify their identity to get deposit insurance. read more

By FATIMA HUSSEIN and KEVIN FREKING (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are seeking to make good on their campaign promise to rein in the IRS with cutbacks built into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress.

The bill rescinds $1.4 billion given to the federal tax collector in the Democrats’ health and energy package that was approved last year on party-line votes. The White House says the debt deal also includes a separate agreement to take $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years and divert those funds to other nondefense programs.

The legislation passed the House on Wednesday and the Senate on Thursday. President Joe Biden said he would sign it into law as soon as possible.

Democrats expended a lot of political capital to get the IRS more money last year. They faced an onslaught of campaign ads, many of them misleading, about the expected hiring of 87,000 “new agents” to target low- and middle-class Americans.

Now, Biden administration officials are offering assurances that the spending cuts secured by Republican negotiators will have minimal impact on the agency’s operations over the next few years. read more

U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker on Thursday disqualified himself from presiding over the court battle between the Walt Disney Company and Gov. Ron DeSantis, but for different reasons than stated in a motion by DeSantis’ legal team which Walker called “nothing more than rank judge-shopping.”

Lawyers for the governor filed a motion for Walker’s disqualification last month claiming that in another case, the judge asked questions that suggested bias in favor of Disney. The entertainment giant filed a federal lawsuit against DeSantis, accusing him of retaliating against the company for speaking out against the Parental Rights in Education Law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics. The law prohibits classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for young students.

According to the motion filed by DeSantis’ legal team, Walker brought up Disney “unprompted” in a separate case and asked whether a record exists of people taking action against those described as “woke” and a pattern of “punitive actions.” read more