Egypt and Jordan are still SDGT rather than FTO, eight months after Washington’s “first step”
The federal designation ladder Stitt is petitioning into has stalled in the gap between two authorities, and the statute that would close it has sat off the House floor since December.
Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025, required the Secretaries of State and the Treasury to report to the President within 30 days on designating Brotherhood chapters or subdivisions, naming Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. On 13 January 2026 the State Department announced designations against the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters, calling the action “a first step in support of President Trump’s commitment to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters that pose a threat to the United States as described in Executive Order 14362.” The Treasury half was narrower: OFAC designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under E.O. 13224, the counterterrorism authority, “for their material support to Hamas.” SDGT and FTO are different instruments with different consequences, and several outlets have collapsed them. CNN Arabic reported the Sudanese branch designated SDGT with an intent to designate it an FTO effective 16 March 2026.
Congress has a statutory version and has not moved it. H.R.4397, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025, was introduced by Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart with Rep. Jared Moskowitz on 15 July 2025, ordered reported by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 3 December 2025 and scored by the Congressional Budget Office on 9 January 2026. It has not reached the floor. The Senate companion, S.2293, contains the clause that is the entire legal fight: it defines a “Muslim Brotherhood branch” as any entity that is a branch, charity or organisation directly or indirectly owned, controlled or affiliated with the Brotherhood, “including — (A) Hamas and Lajnat al-Daawa al-Islamiya.” A Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on 5 August, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America,” was boycotted by the panel’s five Democrats — Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Alex Padilla and Peter Welch — according to Jewish Insider.
The organisation itself is still transacting in public. On 8 August the General Guidance office published a statement on the Freedom and Justice portal, fj-p.com, signed by Prof. Mahmoud Hussein as acting Supreme Guide and dated 24 Safar 1448, welcoming the “Mecca joint defence agreement” and arguing that unity among Islamic-world states is a foundational pillar of their national security. It is self-published and unverified by any third party, but it is datable and signed, which makes it the clearest recent evidence of who holds the acting guide’s pen. Three days later The Economist ran a podcast segment titled “Spring, then fall: a weakened Muslim Brotherhood,” with correspondent Gareth Browne and data journalist James Fransham, arguing the group’s leaders are now in jail or exile.
Assessment: The unresolved question on this desk is not whether more states follow Oklahoma but whether Egypt and Jordan are upgraded from SDGT to FTO. Everything downstream — asset actions, material-support prosecutions, the state proclamations' claim to a federal predicate — turns on that. The eight-month pause suggests the interagency found the evidentiary threshold easier to clear for Hamas-financing conduct than for organisational designation. H.R.4397’s absence from the floor points the same way: an administration governing by executive order gains little from a statute that writes Hamas into a definition of the Brotherhood and hands courts a fixed text to test.