Washington has not designated a Brotherhood chapter since March, and nobody has explained why
Executive Order 14362 framed chapter designations as a rolling process. Four came in the first fifteen weeks. None has come since 9 March.
President Trump signed Executive Order 14362 on 24 November 2025, opening a process to designate certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. On 13 January 2026 the State Department designated the Lebanese chapter and its leader, Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, as SDGTs, while the Treasury designated the Jordanian and Egyptian chapters for providing material support to Hamas. Argentina followed with the same three on 15 January. State added the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood on 9 March. Then the file went quiet. Six months on, no further chapter has been named — not in the Gulf, not in Europe, not in the United States — despite two bills pending in Congress, S.2293 and H.R.3883, neither of which has passed. The designations that exist rest on demonstrable Hamas-finance linkage; the chapters not yet designated are the ones where that linkage is hardest to document.
Two follow-on questions remain open. On 13 January an Egyptian Brotherhood official said the group rejected the designation and would “pursue all legal avenues to challenge” it; we could not establish this week whether any challenge has been filed, and we did not reach the relevant dockets. Lebanon’s al-Jamaa al-Islamiya responded that it is a licensed political and social movement that has operated openly under Lebanese law for decades. Meanwhile the public argument for wider designation has been running on thinner material. On 5 September the New York Post reported, and Townhall aggregated, remarks attributed to Ali al-Qaradaghi of the Doha-based International Union of Muslim Scholars linking 7 October to the rise of American politicians — sourced to an August clip posted by an anonymous partisan account, with a factual error Townhall itself marked “[sic].”
Assessment: The absence is the reportable thing. Either the interagency hit an evidentiary wall on the remaining chapters, or the file was deprioritised once the politically cheapest targets — Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, all governments that either already ban the group or cannot object — had been cleared. Both readings point the same way for Vienna: the American process supplied European ministers with a vocabulary, not a template, and it stalled precisely where European chapters would have to be proven. Distrust the substitution now under way, in which a translated clip of a cleric commenting on American elections is offered as evidence of organisational linkage. That is a designation argument, not a designation case, and the gap between them is six months wide.