It would be trivial for the federal government to offer each individual an electronic money account that legally cannot be closed and is forever accessible to them. And as an adjacent comment wrote, the in person services infrastructure can be tacked onto USPS.
Tacked onto the USPS? Why would it be a good idea to have the USPS run a bank with no experience or staff in banking, for every single person in the country, especially when the USPS CEO is more or less openly trying to dismantle and then privatize it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy
*edit to just add I read the article posted by sibling, they are proposing a “pilot program” to offer check-cashing for a fee, not depository accounts, and it adds that they’re avoiding the word “bank” to distance themselves from places where you have accounts and store money and intend to keep it that way…
Obviously this due to one party trying to dismantle it, which ideally would not happen to our country’s infrastructure. The point is using the network and real estate and organization of an existing federal government entity that already spans the nooks and crannies of the US to get a nationwide benefit up and running.
The same infrastructure can also serve as an identity verification service, which is also sorely needed.
There is no reason it has to operate as a bank, which would involve becoming a lender.
The closest we have to that is gold buried in a hole somewhere or maybe a cold storage seed phrase in your head and the discipline not to reveal it in torture.
