President Donald Trump will extend for the third time the deadline for TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States. White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt confirmed on Tuesday that Trump will sign an executive order this week to extend the deadline for another 90 days, meaning the new deadline is in mid-September.
The Trump administration will spend the next 90 days “working to ensure that we close this deal so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with confidence that their data is safe,” Levitt said.
The extension of the agreement, first signed on January 20, theoretically offers legal cover for TikTok’s U.S. service providers, who are subject to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversaries Act, from the hundreds of billions in fines they could face for keeping the app online and in U.S. app stores. But this legal cover was already shaky, as Trump’s expansions were not codified in a law that was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in Congress and ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.
As previously reported by The Verge, ByteDance and the Oracle-led coalition nearly reached a deal in April, but Trump’s tariffs unexpectedly derailed the previous agreement. Although trade tensions between the US and China have eased, there has been no recent news of this or other deals being restarted. Even when the sale seemed likely, it was unclear whether China would allow ByteDance to sell the valuable algorithm that powers TikTok’s video recommendations.
Several lawmakers, including those who have criticized the law to sell or ban TikTok and ByteDance, have warned that Trump’s repeated extensions of the law are untenable and illegal. After Trump’s last extension of the law in April, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) told The Verge that the move was “illegal” and said that “this is all a sham unless the algorithm is out of Beijing’s control.”
Even before the second extension, Republican Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said that “the algorithm will not get out of Beijing’s control.” Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), who oppose the TikTok ban, wrote to Trump that it would be “unacceptable and unworkable for your administration to continue to ignore the law.” They warned that “any further extension of the TikTok ban would require Oracle, Apple, Google, and other companies to continue to risk devastating legal liability – a decision that is difficult to justify in perpetuity.”
This is because TikTok service providers in the United States can be fined for facilitating access to the app after the ban expires, and Trump’s extension of the ban falls outside the mechanisms allowed by law. For now, however, these companies seem to be relying on the administration’s assurances that they will not be sued for keeping TikTok online, although it reportedly took a letter from the US Attorney General himself to assuage Apple and Google’s concerns.
The court can assess whether Trump’s actions are legal, but only if someone files a lawsuit to stop the extension – and so far, no one has done so. Earlier this month, however, a Google shareholder filed a lawsuit against the company for allegedly failing to share internal documents about its decision to break the law, despite assurances from the Department of Justice. The same shareholder had already filed a lawsuit against the DOJ for allegedly failing to share information about its decision not to enforce the law against Apple and Google.
While members of Trump’s party have not generally gone so far as to call the expansion illegal, a dozen Republicans in the House of Representatives said in April that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. laws are enforced and that the Communist Party of China does not have access to U.S. user data or the ability to manipulate the content Americans consume.” Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters the same month that Trump “should enforce the law and ban TikTok. I don’t think this middle path is viable.”
But it is unclear what would prevent Trump from approving an open-ended extension or a deal that does not meet the letter of the law. As Hawley acknowledged during a conversation with reporters in April, “Congress, we don’t have our own law enforcement agency.”
