The White House has stepped in to keep Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai out of the hot seat. Instead of the two most recognizable faces in tech, the heads of Instagram and YouTube will take the chairs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on child safety practices, tentatively set for July 28.

Five people familiar with the situation told Politico about the intervention. The deal was brokered alongside White House support for a legislative package backed by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley called the James T. Woods Act, a bill aimed squarely at online child exploitation.

What the James T. Woods Act actually does

The Act is named after a teenager who was victimized through Instagram. It bundles together several pieces of legislation, including the SAFE Act, the ECCHO Act, and the Stop Sextortion Act.

The package targets sextortion and child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. In plain terms: it stiffens sentences, creates new criminal offenses for coercion and sextortion targeting minors, and gives prosecutors sharper tools to bring these cases.

Reports of sextortion involving minors have surged sharply in recent years, according to FBI documentation. The exploitation playbook increasingly ends with a ransom demand, and those demands are showing up in crypto, gift cards, and apps like Cash App, per FBI reporting.

Blockchain forensics has identified digital assets being used to launder proceeds from sextortion schemes. The traceability challenges for authorities are real, even on public ledgers, because bad actors route funds through mixers, cross-chain bridges, and peer-to-peer markets to obscure the trail.

Where crypto fits into the child safety conversation

No provisions in the July 28 hearing directly target crypto platforms. But the James T. Woods Act’s focus on payment systems used in exploitation schemes places virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, inside the regulatory aperture, even if they are not named in this specific bill.

For VASPs specifically, the concern is tiered. First, stricter Know Your Customer requirements for transactions flagged to sextortion schemes. Second, potential liability exposure if platforms are shown to have processed known exploitation-linked payments without acting. Third, the precedent this sets for how payment infrastructure gets treated when it appears adjacent to criminal activity, even passively.

The White House endorsed the James T. Woods Act on June 10. Grassley’s willingness to accept the substitute witnesses, the Instagram and YouTube brand heads rather than Zuckerberg and Pichai personally, suggests the administration offered meaningful policy support in exchange.