A standard backed by the US government isn't going to be just another standard.

Yeah, there is an amazing amount of power to force adoption if the Fed tells banks, that to continue to be banks, they must adopt this data standard.

Why don't just copy what's in use in other countries? For example, sending and receiving money in the EU is pretty simple, you only need their IBAN, and maybe their name (AFAIK some countries require it). I'm not even aware of what's going on in the background, but from the user perspective its easy and free.

Well "what's going on in the background" is exactly what's being discussed here. End users will never be exposed to any of it.

No. They didn’t say build a new protocol to rule them all.

On the contrary the argument was to build a locally minimal, but sufficient, protocol that doesn’t try to compete with other locally suitable protocols.

People are taking the parent comment very seriously.