DOJ Says Federal Workers Can Put TikTok Back on Government Phones

Federal employees are free to reinstall TikTok on their government-issued devices, according to a Department of Justice memo reported by Reuters. It's a reversal of a rule that's been in place since 2022, when Congress barred the app from federal phones and computers over concerns about its Chinese ownership.

The DOJ's reasoning: that law doesn't apply anymore, because TikTok isn't really the same company it used to be. Ownership of its U.S. operations has shifted to a new joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. Oracle is taking on the role of security partner for that venture, while ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that built TikTok, holds onto a 19.9% stake rather than full control.

According to Reuters' reporting on the memo, President Trump has given the green light for "employees of Executive Branch agencies" to "download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency's discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies." In other words, it's now allowed at the federal level, but individual agencies still get to decide whether they actually want their staff running the app on government hardware.

This is a narrower story than it might first appear, but it's a telling one. The original 2022 ban only applied to devices owned by the federal government, not the wider public. That changed when Congress passed a broader law aimed at forcing TikTok's sale or shutdown nationwide, driven by longstanding concerns in Washington that ByteDance's ties to China could expose American user data to the Chinese government or allow the app to be used for influence operations. TikTok has consistently denied that it poses any such risk.

When that broader law was set to kick in early last year, TikTok did briefly go dark for U.S. users. But the shutdown didn't last. Trump pushed the deadline back repeatedly and leaned on service providers to keep the app accessible, buying time for a resolution that wouldn't mean an outright ban.

The Oracle-Silver Lake-MGX deal is that resolution. By restructuring ownership so that ByteDance holds a minority stake and an American company oversees security, the arrangement is designed to address the same data-security concerns that drove the original crackdown, without forcing TikTok to disappear from American phones altogether. The DOJ's memo effectively treats that restructuring as reason enough to unwind the restriction on federal devices too.

What happens next largely depends on individual agencies. The memo gives them discretion, meaning some parts of the federal government may choose to keep TikTok off official devices regardless of what's now legally permitted, particularly agencies handling sensitive or classified work. But the door that was firmly shut in 2022 is now open, at least in principle, across the executive branch.

The bigger question is whether this federal-level shift is a preview of how thoroughly the broader TikTok saga has actually been settled, or just another chapter in a fight that's already seen multiple deadlines come and go. For now, the app that was briefly dark for American users last year, and off-limits to federal employees for years before that, has a clearer path back into government life than it's had at any point since the original ban took effect.