The rule banning TikTok on government devices, put in place four years ago, has now been quietly put to rest with a single memo. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) states plainly: "TikTok may be used on government devices," effectively lifting whatever was left of the 2022 restriction.
The memo draws on an earlier opinion from the Department of Justice, which concluded that the 2022 law no longer applies. The reasoning: TikTok now has American shareholders, and the recommendation algorithm it uses is different from the one ByteDance operated back then. In other words, the law itself hasn't changed, but TikTok's ownership structure has—and that's enough to loosen the ban's original footing.
Looking back over the past four years, when the 2022 ban took effect, Biden administration officials including then-FBI Director Chris Wray publicly stated that the app posed a national security threat. But intelligence agencies never disclosed the specifics of that threat. The concerns lawmakers raised at the time mostly centered on TikTok's data collection practices and whether its recommendation algorithm could be influenced by the Chinese government—debates that were never really settled, just eventually overtaken by new political realities.
Last year, TikTok briefly went dark in the U.S. under a law signed by Biden that required ByteDance to sell off the U.S. version of the app or face a shutdown. After Trump took office, the app came back online, and earlier this year the divestiture deal was finalized: the U.S. version of TikTok is now controlled by the "TikTok USDS Joint Venture," backed by investors including Oracle and Silver Lake, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake.
Even before the memo dropped, some federal agencies had already jumped the gun. The Department of Transportation, the Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services all launched official accounts last month, while the White House's account has been live since last year. The policy text hadn't caught up yet, but agencies' social media moves were already ahead of it—probably the most interesting detail buried in this whole story.
