Nine months of Brotherhood designations have produced four US listings and a long column of unfinished business
The 2026 file is thick with announcements. Sorting them by what actually carries legal force leaves a much shorter list — and one Treasury document that nobody has yet read closely.
The enacted column is small and precise. On 13 January the State Department published “Terrorist Designations of Muslim Brotherhood Chapters,” which Al Jazeera and HSToday reported as covering the Egyptian, Lebanese and Jordanian branches. On 9 March the Department designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, with a matching action by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control the same day. That is four chapters, resting on Executive Order 14362 and on the framework the Akin Gump tracker logged on 24 November 2025. Separately, on 23 July, Treasury issued press release SB0572, “Treasury Disrupts Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas Financial Networks” — the single most consequential primary document on the finance question, and one whose count of designated persons and entities this desk has not yet extracted. Until it is read, the finance strand cannot be called either real or rhetorical.
The announced column is longer and softer. In Congress, S.2293 and H.R.3883 remain bills. In France, the National Assembly voted on 22 January to urge an EU-level listing; a European Parliament oral question followed on 26 February, and the push appears to have stalled there rather than reaching the Council. A French bill against “entrisme islamiste” cleared Senate committee scrutiny on 29 April and was reported adopted in May — whether it completed passage over the summer is unresolved. In the Netherlands, a parliamentary approval of a ban was reported on 18 March by a single outlet; a motion is not a prohibition. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott designated the Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organisations, an act now facing litigation.
Assessment: The gap between the two columns is where this story will be won or lost. Designations generate compliance work, bank de-risking and asset freezes; parliamentary resolutions generate press releases. Coverage flattens the difference, and interested parties on both sides benefit from the flattening — one side gets to claim momentum, the other gets to claim persecution. The desk’s next moves are mechanical rather than interpretive: open SB0572 and count, find the Dutch vote record, establish whether the French bill has a commencement date, and separate Jordan’s banned Jamaa from the still-licensed Islamic Action Front. Egypt’s diary is fixed: 56 defendants, 26 September.