The Justice Department determined this week a federal law banning TikTok from government devices no longer applies to the social video app.
The written opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — an office that offers legal advice to the executive branch — was issued six months after TikTok’s U.S.-based operations were shifted to a new joint venture mostly made up of American investors. The social network’s prior ownership by Beijing-based ByteDance, which still holds a minority stake, had drawn years of national security concerns and caused TikTok to face a looming nationwide ban.
In late 2022, Congress passed bipartisan legislation that required executive branch agencies to remove TikTok from federal devices. It also covered “any successor application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Limited or an entity owned by ByteDance Limited.”
But on Thursday, the Justice Department argued that law no longer applies to the version of TikTok currently available in the U.S. In a 12-page opinion addressed to the deputy counsel to the president, the Office of Legal Counsel said that “Congress banned only the version of TikTok that shares the same problematic ownership features.”
It’s still up to individual federal agencies to decide whether to allow TikTok, and agencies can still “independently decide to ban the downloading of TikTok to government devices for workforce management reasons, such as promoting employee productivity.”
The opinion notes at one point: “We understand you have since instructed that employees of Executive Branch agencies may download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency’s discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies.”
The White House referred a request for comment to the Justice Department.
CBS News has reached out to TikTok for comment.
The ban on downloading TikTok to government-owned devices was driven by fears that data from a ByteDance-owned social media app could end up in the hands of the Chinese government — a worry TikTok had long insisted was unwarranted.
In 2024, Congress went further, passing legislation that would effectively ban TikTok from the United States altogether unless ByteDance divested from the app’s U.S. operations by January 2025. The law took effect a day before President Trump’s inauguration.
However, Mr. Trump — who came out against banning TikTok despite supporting a ban in his first term — directed the Justice Department not to enforce the ban, saying he was working on a deal to shift ownership.
A deal that emerged last year and was finalized in January 2026 saw a group of mostly U.S.-based investors take a majority stake in the version of TikTok available to Americans. ByteDance retained 19.9% of the venture, just under the law’s 20% cap.
One of the new investors is Oracle, a tech company chaired by Larry Ellison. His son David Ellison is CEO of Paramount, a Skydance corporation, which is the parent company of CBS News.
The new joint venture — known as TikTok U.S. Data Security, or TikTok USDS — promised intense cybersecurity controls. It said it would retrain the social media platform’s recommendation algorithm using data from American users, and Oracle would “review and validate source code on an ongoing basis.”
The deal drew some scrutiny from lawmakers who pressed for evidence that it would address the national security concerns that led Congress to pass a ban. Two investors in competing tech firms Alphabet and Meta also sued the federal government, arguing the deal did not comply with the law. The federal government has asked for the case to be dismissed. It is still pending.
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