Washington’s Executive Order Has Named Three Brotherhood Chapters; the Senate Text Would Name Twenty-Eight Jurisdictions

Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025, deliberately avoided a blanket ban: it opened a chapter-by-chapter process and gave Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent 45 days to recommend targets. On 13 January 2026 the State Department designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and its leader Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT, in a statement issued in Rubio’s name calling the action “a first step in support of President Trump’s commitment to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters.” The same day, Treasury named the Egyptian and Jordanian branches SDGTs for material support to Hamas, writing that chapters “purport to be legitimate civic organizations while, behind the scenes, they explicitly and enthusiastically support terrorist groups like Hamas.” A Sudanese designation reported effective 16 March 2026 rests, in our research, on CNN Arabic’s Brotherhood tag page; we did not reach the State release, and our checks of the state.gov and OFAC feeds for 1–11 August were not completed.

The statutory track is wider and slower. H.R.4397, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025, was introduced on 15 July 2025 by Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart with Rep. Jared Moskowitz, ordered reported in the nature of a substitute by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 3 December 2025 by 35 votes to 14, and scored by the Congressional Budget Office on 9 January 2026. No floor action has followed in the eight months since the committee vote. The Senate companion, S.2293, whose text was posted 31 July 2025, defines a “Muslim Brotherhood branch” to include Hamas and Lajnat al-Daawa al-Islamiya plus affiliates in twenty-eight named jurisdictions — among them Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Africa — “and others.” A third bill, H.R.3883, would simply require the Secretary of State to designate the organisation outright.

The only designation-adjacent output in the United States inside the 4–11 August window was advocacy writing. On 6 August, Robert Spencer argued at FrontPage Magazine that the 120th Congress, convening 3 January 2027, will seat a record seven Muslim members — six representatives and, for the first time, a senator — and that this favours Brotherhood-linked organisations. That is a projection contingent on November’s results, not a count. It is worth reading only as evidence of how the designation campaign is being argued in movement-conservative media while the bill that would codify the campaign sits undisturbed in the queue.

Assessment: The gap between three chapters and twenty-eight jurisdictions is not drafting sloppiness; it is the whole policy. An executive order lets Washington pick files where the diplomatic cost is near zero — Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and a Sudanese branch already at war with the state’s rivals. A statute defining branches in Riyadh, Doha, Ottawa, Paris and Berlin would force the administration to designate inside its own alliance system, which is precisely why it has not been called for a vote. Read the eight-month stall as a decision taken, not a schedule missed. And treat the absence of an August action as unverified absence: we could not open the feeds.