WASHINGTON — The federal government banned TikTok from its workers’ phones in 2022 because Congress concluded that ByteDance, the app’s Beijing-based parent company, was a national security risk too significant for data privacy commitments to paper over. On Tuesday, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told agencies they can take TikTok off the prohibited list. The tool that prompted four years of restriction, the recommendation algorithm that determines what hundreds of millions of users see and when they see it, remains under ByteDance’s control.
The OMB memo rescinded previous guidance issued to comply with the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which included a provision known as the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act.” That law was bipartisan, specific, and unambiguous: it prohibited the version of TikTok developed or provided by ByteDance from being installed on any device issued by the federal government. More than 20 American states, Canada, and European Union institutions had adopted similar restrictions around the same period, reflecting a convergent judgment about the risks of a Beijing-connected platform on government hardware.
What the OMB memo argues has changed is the ownership. An Oracle-led joint venture finalized roughly six months ago now controls TikTok’s American operations, with Oracle and a consortium of U.S. investors holding the majority stake and ByteDance retaining approximately 20 percent. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel reviewed that structure and concluded that the U.S.-operated version, now formally organized as the TikTok U.S. Data Security joint venture, falls outside the scope of the 2022 law, which targeted ByteDance-provided software specifically. The OMB accepted that reasoning and circulated guidance giving agencies a legal basis to remove TikTok from their prohibited application lists.
Senator Maria Cantwell, the Democrat of Washington who leads the Senate Commerce Committee, responded with a question the memo did not answer. “Have operational ties between ByteDance and TikTok’s U.S. operations truly been severed?” Cantwell said in a statement. “Who controls the algorithm?” The algorithm is the product. It determines which videos rise and which do not, which users are nudged toward particular content and in what sequence, and how the platform’s engagement mechanics operate across 170 million American accounts. Under the terms of the Oracle joint venture, the recommendation engine stayed with ByteDance. The joint venture holds the American data and runs the American business. ByteDance holds what makes the business work.
The practical result across the federal government is already inconsistent. The Office of Personnel Management says it will permit limited personal use of TikTok on government devices in defined circumstances. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is maintaining its blanket prohibition, citing cybersecurity commitments that extend beyond the OMB memo’s guidance. NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency are applying case-by-case reviews rather than a unified policy. As FedScoop reported, the patchwork reflects a reality the White House memo did not resolve: federal agencies operate under different threat models, maintain different security architectures, and answer to different oversight structures, and the OMB guidance establishes a floor while leaving the ceiling entirely to individual agencies.
Civil liberties researchers and security policy experts read the memo with the same skepticism Cantwell expressed. Calli Schroeder, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, described the administration’s risk calculus as offering “very little benefit for very high risk.” Patrick K. Lin, a technology policy scholar at New York University, offered a more structural critique: the national security concern underlying the original TikTok ban was at least partly shaped by the interest of American companies in gaining access to the engagement and targeting data that ByteDance had accumulated over years. The DOJ legal opinion resolves whether the Oracle joint venture falls within a statutory definition. It does not evaluate whether the risk the statute was designed to address has actually changed.
The political backdrop complicates the administration’s framing. Donald Trump’s first administration was the government that initially moved to ban TikTok entirely, issuing a series of executive orders in 2020 that courts blocked on First Amendment grounds. The app survived through years of litigation, a brief U.S. service interruption in January 2025, and a deal that Trump himself facilitated in his second term by signaling to Oracle and its investors that a restructured ownership arrangement would be preferable to an outright ban. Washington Examiner reported the reversal came after the ownership transfer was finalized. The White House that once directed the Commerce Department to bar TikTok from American app stores has now removed TikTok from the federal government’s prohibited-apps list.
That reversal lands inside a broader pattern of U.S.-China technology restrictions that has been moving in the opposite direction. The Federal Communications Commission’s ban two weeks ago on new imports of Chinese-made humanoid robots and solar inverters applied the same national security logic that Congress used to restrict TikTok in 2022, extending it to hardware rather than software. The OMB memo does not revise that logic. It concludes, through a statutory interpretation rather than a new security assessment, that the restructured TikTok no longer fits the category the 2022 law was describing.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling last week, which held that TikTok and other platforms cannot invoke Section 230 to shield themselves from thousands of teen addiction lawsuits, operates through a separate legal pipeline entirely. Taken together, the two decisions issued within days of each other capture the contradictory position TikTok now occupies in American law: simultaneously cleared for reinstallation on the phones of federal workers and stripped of a liability protection it relied on for years. The app is more formally welcome inside the federal government than it has been since 2022. The legal exposure it faces in civil court has grown.
The Australian government’s experience with its teen social media ban produced an 81 percent non-compliance rate among under-16s after three months, illustrating the distance between formal regulatory decisions and the behavior of a platform with 170 million U.S. users. Tuesday’s OMB memo changed TikTok’s status on government devices. What it did not change is the answer to the question Cantwell asked: who controls the recommendation engine that decides what a federal worker, or anyone else, sees next.
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