Washington — For a fourth time, President Trump has pushed back enforcing a bipartisan law that would effectively ban TikTok over the video-sharing app’s failure to cut ties with ByteDance, its China-based parent company.
The president signed an executive order Tuesday extending the pause on enforcing the law until at least Dec. 16.
The move comes on the heels of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement Monday that U.S. and Chinese negotiators had agreed to “a framework” to resolve a dispute over TikTok’s ownership. Mr. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are planning to speak Friday “to firm everything up,” as Mr. Trump put it Tuesday morning.
The law, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, took effect a day before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January. Mr. Trump, however, has issued new orders every few months directing the Justice Department not to take action or impose penalties against companies like Apple and Google for failure to remove the widely popular app from their platforms.
Under the law, ByteDance must divest from TikTok or lose access to U.S. app stores and web-hosting services.
Members of Congress and national security officials have for years warned that TikTok could serve as a vehicle for China to spy on Americans, collect vast amounts of their data or serve them propaganda. During his first term, Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban the app, citing the potential security risks.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has praised TikTok for helping him win the support of young voters and dismissed concerns about the app as “highly overrated.” The White House recently launched its own TikTok account.
Mr. Trump has said for months that a deal to sell TikTok is on the verge, but the details of an official agreement, which would be subject to approval from the Chinese government, have yet to be made public.
“We have American buyers,” Mr. Trump told reporters last month, adding that he had yet to speak with Xi about a sale.
Mr. Trump also teased a deal in late June, telling Fox News in an interview that a group of wealthy individuals had agreed to buy TikTok and he would be sharing more in the coming weeks. Mr. Trump said he thought Xi “will probably do it.”
Discussions with China about a potential sale were happening “at the highest level,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on June 30.
In late July, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on CNBC that the “deal is over to them right now,” referring to China, and warned that TikTok “is going to go dark” if it’s not approved.
“We made the decision. We can’t have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones,” he said.
Lutnick said China or ByteDance “can have a little piece” but “Americans will have control” of the algorithm and “own the technology.”
TikTok was a topic of conversation during Bessent’s trade talks on Monday with Chinese officials in Spain. When asked by reporters later in the day whether China would have a stake in the company, Mr. Trump said, “We haven’t decided that.”
An apparent deal in April fell through after Mr. Trump announced new tariffs on China. The deal would have spun TikTok’s operations in the U.S. into a new company that was owned and operated by a majority of American investors, a source familiar with the plans said at the time.
Sources with knowledge of the negotiations told CBS News this week that the latest deal includes technology company Oracle and private equity firm Silver Lake. (David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is the chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance, which is the parent company of CBS. The Ellison family owns a controlling interest in Paramount Skydance.)
The Chinese Embassy in Washington responded on Tuesday morning that China will “firmly defend its national interests, the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, and will carry out technology export approvals according to relevant laws and regulations.”
The statement added that the Chinese government “also fully respects the will of enterprises and supports them in conducting business negotiations on an equal footing in accordance with market principles.”
Lawmakers have said that any deal that does not divest TikTok from ByteDance runs afoul of the law, including any arrangement that allows TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. while using ByteDance’s algorithm.
During arguments before the Supreme Court, TikTok’s lawyer said the app “would be a fundamentally different platform” if it was forced to completely cut ties with ByteDance because the new owner would have to rebuild the algorithm, which would take years. In legal filings, TikTok said the inability to share any data with ByteDance would mean that the app’s 170 million American users would not be able to access global content and vice versa.
Trump claims authority to not enforce law
Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota law professor, said it’s not unusual for laws to go unenforced, but it’s typically because there are resource constraints or the law is ambiguous. The TikTok law is “completely unambiguous,” he said.
“There’s no room to argue that the law doesn’t say what it says and there’s also no resource constraint,” he said. “I don’t think that there is a sort of similar instance of this sort of flagrant attempt to let a company violate the law.”
In letters to tech companies earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote that Mr. Trump “determined that an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform would interfere with the execution of the president’s constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States.”
Bondi said the Justice Department is “irrevocably relinquishing” any legal claims against the companies, informing them that they can continue to make TikTok available in their app stores “without violating the act, and without incurring any legal liability.”
The letters were made public in early July as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
“Whatever your view of prosecutorial discretion, it does not give the president the power to say that something prohibited by statute is actually lawful,” said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. “It would at most let you suspend enforcement. In other words, you might be able to never seek penalties under the law, but … you can’t tell them that they’re acting lawfully when they’re violating the statute.”
Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University, called the claims in Bondi’s letters an “excessive assertion of presidential power.”
But Chander said that by not enforcing the law instead of shutting it down, Mr. Trump may have a better chance at accomplishing what Congress insisted was the law’s intent: to force a sale.
“It’s a lot harder to sell a dead horse than a live horse,” Chander said. “If you force it to shut down and then hope in six months that you might engineer a sale — at that point, the value might have diminished so much that there’s very little reason, very little economic incentive for ByteDance to sell at all.”
Mr. Trump’s non-enforcement of the law has prompted some pushback from lawmakers, though the intensity has been relatively muted compared to the alarms Congress sounded over the app’s potential national security risks.
“The courts have been really clear on this,” Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told reporters in early June. “I think we ought to enforce the law.”
Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington said “the law is clear” and called for it to be “implemented as written.”
Caitlin Yilek
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
