Eight months after Washington’s first Brotherhood designations, no visible follow-on
The State Department called the 13 January listings “opening actions” of a “sustained effort.” As of 1 September, 231 days have passed with no confirmed second tranche.
On 13 January 2026 the United States designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, listed its leader Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT, and had the Treasury designate the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters as SDGTs for providing material support to Hamas. The State Department’s spokesperson’s office wrote that the designations “reflect the opening actions of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood chapters' violence and destabilization wherever it occurs,” and that Washington “will use all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.” The action came 50 days after Executive Order 14362 of 24 November 2025, which set the designation process in motion without designating anyone.
Since then the public record thins out. A commercial legislative-tracking service, Legis1, reports a 23 July Treasury action against a senior Egyptian Brotherhood official, three other individuals and three entities accused of supporting Hamas. The Files has not been able to match that account to an OFAC file number, a named target or a Treasury press release, and does not treat it as confirmed. On 5 August the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America,” previously scheduled for May and postponed; the committee’s own witness list consists of a retired FBI agent now at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, a litigation counsel from the National Jewish Advocacy Center and an analyst from the Center for Security Policy. No opposing witness appears on it.
Assessment: Two explanations fit the silence and neither is provable today. Either the interagency has slowed — the plausible petitioners for a pause are Amman, Cairo, Doha and Ankara, none of whom would confirm it — or the second tranche is moving through OFAC and rulemaking channels that produce nothing visible for months. Readers should also hold open a third possibility: that the gap is an artefact of what has been searched rather than of what exists. The measurable thing is the 23 July action. If its targets include a European- or Gulf-registered entity, the file moves from symbolic listing to correspondent-banking consequence, which is a different order of event.