Government workers can officially waste time scrolling TikTok again
News Social Media Government workers can officially waste time scrolling TikTok again The app was banned from government devices in 2022. 11, 2026 5:03 pm EST Al Drago/Getty Images Trump administration officials are now free to post and endlessly scroll TikTok, a new memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says. The memo is the latest move from the federal government formally undoing a 2022 law that banned the app from most government-issued devices, The OMB memo cites an earlier opinion from the Justice Department.
- ▪News Social Media Government workers can officially waste time scrolling TikTok again The app was banned from government devices in 2022.
- ▪11, 2026 5:03 pm EST Al Drago/Getty Images Trump administration officials are now free to post and endlessly scroll TikTok, a new memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says.
- ▪The memo is the latest move from the federal government formally undoing a 2022 law that banned the app from most government-issued devices, The OMB memo cites an earlier opinion from the Justice Department.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2235010/government-workers-can-officially-waste-time-scrolling-tiktok-again/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:03:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T21:05:44.225Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T21:05:44.225Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9pm5HQb6bOUP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News Social Media Government workers can officially waste time scrolling TikTok again The app was banned from government devices in 2022. By Karissa Bell Aug. 11, 2026 5:03 pm EST Al Drago/Getty Images Trump administration officials are now free to post and endlessly scroll TikTok, a new memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says. The memo is the latest move from the federal government formally undoing a 2022 law that banned the app from most government-issued devices, The OMB memo cites an earlier opinion from the Justice Department. The DoJ said the 2022 law no longer applies because the current version of TikTok has American owners and relies on a different recommendation algorithm than the app that operated under ByteDance.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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