Powel recenlty made a series of
statements around digital currency. Among the declarations:
Fed Chair Jerome Powell says central bank-backed digital currencies must coexist alongside cash and other forms of money
Powell recently said that a potential digital dollar is a "high priority" project for the US, although that comes with notable technical and policy-related issues
Effectively, the issue for government backed digital currencies, which are not anything like a decentralised crypto, is regulations. To elaborate, the world has seen massive changes in the way money moves around. Banks are in general interested in putting some friction and cost to money movements, and a digital currency would probably create an environment to that middleman to disappear or be much less relevant.
Governments are mostly concern about what does means to the control they currently have on the flows of information about money, money laundering and taxation. So we should read any comment in that light and translate: "We do not have the regulations in place to allow for a digital dollar". On a side comment, China may use this opportunity to get ahead and has shown
some movement towards it.