Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification. There is no reason Plaid should have a monopoly on this. If banks opened up APIs for bank account verification, then anyone could compete with Plaid.
As usual the Justice Department doesn't know what they're talking about.
One final point: the future relevance of 'bank integration as an API' companies, such as plaid, is really murky. With the advent of Open Banking regulations, real time national payment systems etc the difficulty of integrating various banks using a single API will be drastically reduced.
The only way to do that in what context? When I had a very tiny freelance IT consulting side business in 2011 (and maybe some of 2010), TD Bank was happy to sell me ACH origination access as part of my business account.
Yeah they charged me $10 per batch, so not great for a micro use case, but more tolerable when there are a bunch of higher-price-tag transactions per batch. They didn't require me to do any verification of the other account - they couldn't since the other account didn't have to be mine. I just had to agree to follow NACHA rules and I could put in any account number and routing number I wanted. It's amazing how much access a random individual is easily granted to pull and push money... (Obviously I didn't abuse it, and the blowback following a complaint would have been severe if I had.)