Federal employees can download TikTok on their work phones again
The Department of Justice has announced that federal employees may once again use TikTok on government devices, reversing a 2022 ban after a deal transferred TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX.
According to Reuters, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has stated that federal employees can now download and use TikTok on their government-issued devices. The previous ban, enacted in 2022, prohibited the use of the short-form video app on such devices. However, the DOJ reportedly determined that the ban no longer applies due to a deal that transferred TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. In this joint venture, Oracle acts as the security partner, while former owner ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake.
A DOJ memo indicates that President Donald Trump has authorized "employees of Executive Branch agencies" to download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to each agency's discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies.
The ban on government employees was followed by a broader TikTok ban across the United States. Yet when that law took effect early last year, the app was only briefly unavailable before Trump repeatedly delayed enforcement and urged service providers to restore access. As a result, TikTok became widely accessible again.
