Sources told Reuters on Monday that a key spending bill will include a plan to stop federal government employees from using the Chinese app TikTok on devices owned by the government.
Last week, the Senate voted on a bill by Republican Senator Josh Hawley that would make it illegal for federal employees to use the short video app owned by ByteDance on government-owned devices. It was the latest thing that U.S. lawmakers did to get tough on Chinese companies because they were worried about national security.
Related: Alabama and Utah ban TikTok on government phones.
Sources say that the ban will be part of a big bill to fund the U.S. government, which is expected to be voted on this week.
Last week, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy agreed to back the plan.
TikTok has said that most of the worries are based on false information. The law wouldn’t change anything for the more than 100 million Americans who use TikTok on their own devices or ones owned by their companies.
TikTok is already banned from government-owned devices at the White House, Defense, Homeland Security, and State departments.
Also on Monday, Louisiana and West Virginia became the latest states to ban the use of TikTok on government devices out of fear that China could use it to track Americans and censor content.
At least part of TikTok is now blocked on government computers in 19 of the 50 U.S. states. Most of the limits were put in place in the last two weeks.
In 2020, when he was still the Republican President, Donald Trump tried to stop new users from downloading TikTok and to ban other transactions that would have stopped the app from being used in the U.S., but he lost a series of court cases.
Related: ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is raising the price of shares that employees can buy back.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is part of the U.S. government and is in charge of national security, has been trying for months to reach a national security agreement to protect the data of U.S. TikTok users. However, it doesn’t look like a deal will be reached before the end of the year.
